


Let Go

by crystalrequiem



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: Blood and Gore, Cannon-typical death, Disaster Demi Kurogane, Drinking, Dysthymia, Insects (Moths), Loss of Control, Loss of Sanity, M/M, Mercy Kill, Self-Destructive Behavior, Semi-Graphic Injuries, Slaughter!Kurogane, Suicidal Thoughts, Team Fluff, Vast!Fai, Very minor TMA spoilers, falling, general horror, heights, human remains, l'appel du vide, this has a happy ending i swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:27:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 49,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25877407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crystalrequiem/pseuds/crystalrequiem
Summary: Kurogane just wants a damn cup of coffee and a break from the crazy, reality bending shithole he works in. Between the torment of his dreams and the new barista, he's only liable to get one of the two.(Vague TMA crossover - no need for familiarity with TMA)Kurofai Olympics 2020 - Team Fluff
Relationships: Fay D. Fluorite/Kurogane, Kurofai - Relationship
Comments: 50
Kudos: 41
Collections: 2020 KuroFai Olympics - Fluff vs Angst





	1. The Call

**Author's Note:**

  * For [superyuui](https://archiveofourown.org/users/superyuui/gifts).



> Hello crew, Please make sure to take a look at those tags. This is a horror-romance fic, and as such, has many horror elements some might find disturbing. 
> 
> You don't need to know TMA to read this fic--as such, I've done my absolute best to keep all spoilers to a minimum. Hope you can enjoy the podcast too! but if you've never listened before, all you need to know is that it's a horror podcast about an institute that studies and archives spooky stories. 
> 
> This was written for Team Fluff in the 2020 KuroFai Olympics. I intend it to be a fluff fic, but probably most would not call it a purely fluffy fic. ^_^;; Consider it the fluffy side of horror?
> 
> BIIIIIG shoutouts to Superyuui and Antiquestars, without whom I probably would not have finished this thing. Certainly it wouldn't have turned out as well! 
> 
> All reviews are loved.
> 
> And don't forget to check out everyone else's Fic Olympics work on the Kurofai DreamWidth page. Go Team Fluff!  
> <https://kurofai.dreamwidth.org/>
> 
> The L'appel Du Vide prompt also pulled some kicking art from Lauand that you can take a look at here:  
> <https://kurofai.dreamwidth.org/132782.html>

* * *

According to the most recent Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences from the Health and Safety Executive, the rate of fatal workplace injury for industry code 91 (Libraries, archives, museums and other cultural activities) amounts to approximately five per thousand people per year. The Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences might have further elaborated that four of those five deaths occur at the Magnus Institute, London. And it might have further, _further_ elaborated that from year to year the Artifact Storage department usually wins the dubious award of Most Deadly Department in the Institute unless the Archives have had a particularly rough go of things.

Of course, none of the job adverts for openings in Artifact Storage mention this particular honor. Kurogane wonders whether it would have mattered if they did. Artifact Storage still seems to attract a very specific type of dumbass to the staff roster, and he tries not to think too hard about what it means to count himself among that number.

He doesn’t _hate_ his job. Far from it. Something twisted in his head gets a thrill from the threat of danger. And when someone fucks up and the artifacts throw something truly monstrous his way, he doesn’t have to worry about hurting anyone if he really cuts loose in a fight. Only the constant paranoia eventually wears him down.

Artifacts— _real_ artifacts, not the objects of people’s mundane ghost stories—can be literally anything. When something new arrives in storage, no matter how benign it looks, it absolutely _must_ be treated as a dangerous, unstable weapon. No touching with bare skin, minimum contact if possible, and all reasonable containment should be immediately employed.

Some things make themselves obvious, like the set of scalpels still dripping with blood that never dries someone passed along last week. Others… well. On the floor below his desk, his predecessor had locked a cast-iron frying pan into its own high capacity cooling system before “retiring.” It still manages to heat his cubicle like a sauna when the mood strikes it. On those days, the resting temperature of the air several feet above its surface is hot enough to bubble fat beneath human skin.

Needless to say, a healthy amount of suspicion for mundane objects is a matter of life and death in Archive storage. It usually serves him well, but he starts to have trouble separating his work situation from the rest of the world. Outside is supposed to be the haven of reality, where everything makes sense and the table across the room _doesn’t_ secretly want to kill him. He just has trouble convincing himself of that.

He knows it’s the sort of thing he should talk to a therapist about—He’d gotten used to seeing one after the total wreck of his childhood, but he doesn’t know how the hell he would explain this damn job. Kurogane does not think he will ever be able to explain to any human outside Artifact Storage that he’s gotten jumpy around decorative pottery because last week he saw a creature crawl out of a Ming Dynasty vase and try to eat a co-worker.

He starts carrying a long knife and picks up a caffeine addiction instead. Coffee suits him far better than sleep anyway—he’d rather suffer heat flashes and heart palpitations than dreams.

* * *

The small cafe just a few minutes’ walk north-west of the Magnus Institute has served as Kurogane’s only saving grace for the last year now. He has never appreciated added sweeteners or foam, and in his opinion this place has the only decent black coffee for miles.

Even his paranoia calms a little as he steps through the glass door and hears the chime of the bell. Sure, any fork in the cup by the espresso machine might secretly entreat the holder to eat people or something, but he has a hard time staying on edge when the smell of roasted coffee hits the air. Stupid, but somehow the smell reminds him of relief.

Besides, paranoia aside, he has started to get a pretty good instinct for these things. He wouldn’t have lasted long without it.

At first, nothing seems out of place. The London morning crowd clogs the small space of the shop as usual, customers thronging here for caffeine before a long commute or a slow day. Kurogane joins them, not thinking of much. He woke up with the strangest feeling of foreboding this morning—a common companion—and he just _knows_ they’re going to get a new delivery in today.

The line moves quickly, one zombified customer at a time, until finally only two people separate him from the cashier and the goal of coffee. He starts to feel nervous—an itch beneath his skin, a restlessness in his hands he usually only feels moments before something goes wrong. His eyes dart around the café, searching for the source. Just by chance, he happens to glance toward the counter and catch the gaze of the person stacking drinks on the bar and—

Blue eyes. Fall into the sky blue. Bottom of the ocean blue. The sort of blue that sends all the breath fleeing his lungs and drops his stomach to his knees with vertigo. This room was crowded just seconds ago, but somehow he begins to feel the space that isolates him. Unfathomable, impossible distance that stretches on and on forever in every direction. The endless maw of a gaping beast too enormous to comprehend.

He—

Blinks.

“Can I take your order sir?” The girl at the cashier asks with a bored expression, looking with confusion at the way he stands just a little too far from the counter. Kurogane stares at her without comprehension for just a second more, glancing between her and the stranger currently manning the espresso machine. The blonde doesn’t let on that anything happened at all, simply moving between one paper cup and the next. He could, maybe, have written the strange moment off as nothing more than a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep... if not for the self-satisfied smirk scrawled over the guy’s face.

Besides. Kurogane does have a pretty good feel for these things… that asshole did something. He just doesn’t know what.

“Sir?” The girl asks again, boredom giving way to mounting anxiety. “Are you… okay?”

“Yeah,” Kurgoane grouches, cursing his fucking luck. He’s been using this place as an escape from work, so it fucking figures he’d find work here to meet him eventually. He’s never seen a _person_ that could pull shit like the artifacts could, but sure! Why not?

The paranoia he keeps trying to escape crawls over his every nerve and he truly begins to understand that nowhere and nothing is safe.

“Forgot my wallet,” he lies to the poor barista, turns back and walks past his fellow customers to the door. The musical sound of laughter chases him out into the street.

* * *

He doesn’t hate his job. He doesn’t. But sometimes he just wants to—he could _strangle_ someone.

The latest acquisition included nothing special—a creepy looking doll that someone’s aunt swore was haunted, but he’d only needed to look at the thing to know it wasn’t really. Two books that had seemed dubious, but they hadn’t put up a fuss when lifted into separate containers with tongs. He suspected they were only minor items if anything. He hasn’t seen more than meaningless junk from a delivery in _weeks_ , and he can’t tell which pisses him off worse: the boredom or the anticipation that something far worse must be imminent.

The case around the perfectly innocent looking umbrella in Storage Area U has begun showing signs of acid erosion again, despite the lack of any kind of liquid residue or damage anywhere else in the room. Nothing unusual there. Normally they would simply switch the umbrella to a new case. (They usually rehome it every few months.) But they’re running low on glass displays, Hannah in accounting doesn’t understand why they would need to buy something like a Teflon case for artifact storage, and he has absolutely no way to explain a possessed, acid rain-inducing umbrella.

(Because of course, while anyone who’s ever worked in Artifact Storage understands that the shit that lives there absolutely breaks the laws of reality, the rest of the Institute seems to have very little grasp of the situation.)

Kurogane thinks he could successfully argue for it if he could just get his department head to sign off, but the asshole decided to push for another fifteen glass cases instead because “we wouldn’t be able to see it if it were inside the Teflon case.” As if that fucking matters! It’s a goddamn umbrella. It _looks_ like a goddamn umbrella. And while it melts shit around it and he’d never touch it without protective gear and a pair of tongs, it has never once changed its appearance.

Ugh. Just. Fucking stupid.

Now, usually, on a day like this, with his temper running high and no end to his frustrations in sight, he would escape at lunch and make a trip down the road for coffee. He can’t do that now. He hasn’t returned since the vertigo hypnotism incident.

Kurogane doesn’t know what to think about the barista with the gaze that feels like falling, or what to do. His whole job revolves around keeping dangerous, paranormal things contained. Just when he’d started to think he really understood the ins and outs and the usual ways Artifacts with a capital “A” could act… he’d run into a person with the same sort of effect.

What does that mean for him? Should he… report it somehow? He doesn’t know to whom or how. Besides, the ethics of keeping a person contained seem spotty at best, even if they can toss random passers-by into an agoraphobia attack on a whim. On the other hand, he doesn’t know how much damage that guy can really do…

He decides to leave it. Part of him thinks… maybe this madness only follows him because he has so much contact with it through work. Maybe If he stays away from the coffee shop the strangeness will leave it and he can pretend he did anything to protect it.

(Maybe he’s lying to himself)

* * *

The dreams deepen—pull him deeper into a tide he doesn’t understand with every night.

_Something deep and thrumming beneath his skin that drives him with certainty even as anger bubbles over and boils his thoughts. He doesn’t know why or where he is, nor can he truly comprehend the scene that plays out at his hands, but he doesn’t need to. His sense of self cannot surface from the haze of blood and the sound of pipes._

_The knife in his grip feels good, feels right as he tears through another neck, lands a second hit in the next opponent’s chest. He can feel the sting of the wounds that lace his own body but they only drive him harder, wild-eyed and eager to make them all hurt far worse. There used to be a reason for this, he thinks, but he doesn’t need one now. The call of blood and the piercing whistle of the Piper’s song both wail so much louder than reason._

_Drill through the mass of shooting-stabbing-screaming-slashing, cut the rest down and do not think of silly things like “why.” Sing the song with each drop spilled and each swing of the blade, for the pipes are calling._

Kurogane wakes with a start, whole body dotted with sweat, adrenaline sending his heart through its paces. One of the nightmares come to call again—mindless, senseless slaughter that shouldn’t unnerve him as much as it does.

He goes to push sweat-soaked hair away from his over-heated brow and finds his fingers wrapped around the hilt of the knife, still sheathed, but… He drops it, trying not to think too deeply of dream memories and the slippery grasp of a knife handle drenched in red. It lies innocently atop the sheets. 

That’s not…. That doesn’t mean anything, right? He’d been upset and frightened by the dream and must have grabbed it from beneath the pillow out of instinct. It doesn’t mean anything.

(He doesn’t know how much longer he can believe that)

* * *

Another morning, another commute. Kurogane makes his way off the tube at Sloane Square and wanders blearily up the steps into the early grey light of London. He _should_ make his way immediately to the Institute. No good sleep to speak of, but he hadn’t finished re-inventorying Area W last night and he has a sneaking suspicion about a “misplaced” book. He could head there now and make an early go at things before anyone else shows up to distract him.

Or, whispers the temptation of clarity, he could go get a coffee.

Kurogane crosses the street and steps west with determination.

He hasn’t forgotten the strange creature of—he doesn’t know what to call it. Heights? Depths? Giant things?—Whatever. He hasn’t forgotten the creature who pulled him into a hallucination before. He’s just much more willing than usual to fight an unholy abomination for a moderately good cup of black coffee.

The chiming of the bell as he enters the café sounds off. Just a touch too shrill—almost like…

No. Nope. Kurogane refuses. He will not think about strange pipe music or the battlefield of his dreams. He will buy a damn cup of coffee and stay awake.

Bolstered by annoyance, he glances over the other customers, noting the crowd swarms just as thick as usual. Still the room feels somehow more spacious than he remembers.

Sure enough, the same strange blond with the stare that nearly floored him last time still grins away at the customers behind the counter. He gave up the espresso machine for the cash register, but it doesn’t seem to have dampened his mood.

Kurogane pays attention this time. He knows what to look for. “Welcome! How can I help you?” the stranger calls out with a wide grin. No one reacts abnormally as they move through all the usual route motions of the café transaction. Not at first, anyway. Four people make their way through the line before Kurogane catches anything odd. Then, without warning, he watches as the woman in front of the cash register stiffens, her purse sliding through her slack grip. She startles before she can drop it completely and just stands there, blinking for a second too long at the stranger’s blithe grin. With a dazed expression and a distant voice she stutters out her order, and the line moves on. As if nothing had happened at all.

Well. It’s not _that_ dangerous, he reasons to himself. (This is incredibly foolhardy.) The woman seems just fine, if a little frazzled as she steps to the side to wait for her drink, one hand pressed self-consciously against her chest. (He could have had some kind of delayed effect. Kurogane doesn’t _know_ —) Besides, Kurogane’s already faced this guy once and been fine for it. He can do that again. (What if he got lucky last time?) He wants a goddamn cup of coffee, alright?

The bodies between himself and the cash register dwindle until at last Kurogane looks up and finds the cashier’s smiling face.

“Oh!” The asshole chimes, eyes half lidded. The nametag on his chest, now in full view, proclaims his name as “ _Fai._ ” It doesn’t sound like an evil creature sort of name but then he supposes evil-sounding names are hardly a requirement. “You’re back! Did you finally find your wallet?”

“I did, actually,” he grouches. He expects to feel the strangest sensation of falling at any second, but it doesn’t come. He squints, rendered suspicious by Fai’s too-pleasant expression.

“Something on my face?”

“No, guess not.” Fine. Maybe the guy can only use the trick on someone once? “Just a house coffee, please. No cream or sugar.” They perform the usual exchange of goods and services, but Fai seems far too smug as he trades Kurogane’s card back over the bar.

“Just wait here—I’ll get that coffee for you,” he offers, turning to the spigot that dispenses the house blend and Kurogane just _knows_ if he doesn’t leave now he’s going to face that fall/dispersion/endless void again.

He puts his wallet back in his pocket, makes sure his hands are free and doesn’t budge.

“Right here, sir,” Fai demures, holding Kurogane’s coffee up like a lure, and the way the light hits his eyes doesn’t reflect quite right. Almost like his gaze is somewhere else—like his eyes were cut from a different scene and photo-shopped back in. Kurogane looks him directly in the face as he grasps the cup anyway.

_He expects it, this time, and that lessens the effect but cannot halt it completely. The world is endless, is gone, is nothing. He falls so far and fast that his lungs cannot find the air, for all that he knows, suspects, it causes the dull roar in his ears. There is only the sky, the sea, the gaping maw of the universe and the endless fall. His heart races and his mouth dries, and he—_

Does not care.

His mind tries to muster the fear he knows he should feel, his body reacts, but the dregs of emotion he has left run low after the weeks of nightmares. He watches nothing fly by for all he _knows_ he must be falling, disoriented by the lack of reference point until the massive mouth of an incomprehensible giant looms below. He should fear _that_ at least, he thinks, but in his annoyance he only wonders what it might take to kill something like that. Whether it might make him feel better.

Time stretches further than it should, but he finds himself blinking back to reality long before he loses the exhausted anger that drives him. The blonde cashier stares, utterly-blank faced and clearly thrown off by Kurogane’s lack of reaction. Good.

He holds the coffee up towards Fai’s mounting confusion in a “cheers” motion and makes his way for the door, prize in hand. He steals the first sip on the front step of the Institute’s entrance. It’s the best damn coffee he’s ever had.


	2. The Void

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kurogane battles a being far more terrifying than any artifact in Storage--Feelings.

* * *

The days go by in a blur. He doesn’t have nightmares every night, but often enough to worry him. They cycle through a few different scenes, all terrible but in some he keeps more of his mind than others. In some, he has to re-watch memories of….

Suffice it to say, they suck. He doesn’t know what to do about them. He thinks again of a therapist, but he doesn’t want to figure out the web of lies he’d have to tell to make his situation make any kind of sense without getting himself locked up.

Instead, every time he wakes up shivering and unable to wash away the phantom sensation of gore on his skin, he throws himself out the flat door and rushes to the café.

It’s a routine—a strange little ritual that helps to keep him distracted. The frission of danger he feels every time he marches toward unknown territory works even better than the coffee to keep him alert, and he can’t deny how fun it is to wind that smarmy barista up. Fai is unfortunately attractive and Kurogane probably enjoys the way he pouts after his latest attempt has failed a little too much. They’ve barely spoken more than the same four sentences over and over again, but somehow Kurogane starts to feel like this has become a game to the both of them, and he finds connection in that. A desperate sort of connection, but one he needs more than even he knows.

He has no illusions about it; this won’t end well. The conclusion will probably see him eaten by the looming mouth at the edge of the horizon Fai keeps introducing him to, but something in him has deeply and fundamentally broken and he no longer cares.

(Maybe he just thinks falling forever would be a better fate than losing his mind to violence, if he has a choice)

This morning he’d arrived far earlier than usual. Too early—Fai hadn’t been on shift yet and Kurogane can’t help the twisted disappointment that grips him at the fact. He takes his coffee from the mundane staff with good grace, thinks of trudging off to work and… eyes the empty table near the door.

He has hours before he’s supposed to clock in. He could afford to sit at the table for a while and finish his coffee in peace, right? Not like he’s waiting to see the asshole blond or anything. Of course not.

Kurogane finishes making false reassurances to himself and settles at the table nearest the door. From here, he can see the whole room around himself, a fact that quiets the ever-present paranoia in his chest just a little.

The morning passes in a haze as he slowly downs the dark liquid in his cup. By the time he spots Fai stepping in from the back room he has only a few sips left and even fewer minutes before he needs to leave to make it to the Institute on time.

He catches the instant his presence registers on Fai’s radar, watching Fai’s expression transform from placid smile to a wicked grin. Kurogane raises an eyebrow in his direction and pretends he doesn’t care.

“Well hello, Mr. Black. Fancy seeing you here.” The barista wanders his way, brandishing a rag and wiping down the table next to them for the pretext. Kurogane rests his chin in his hand, following Fai’s movements so closely, so attentive to the glint of light in his eyes he almost doesn’t catch the nickname.

“…Mr. Black?”

“It’s the only kind of coffee you’ve ever ordered. You could at _least_ make it a little interesting sometimes. Then you could have had a cool nickname, like Mr. Macchiato, but noooo.” Fai’s voice lilts and falls like a song as he pouts, scrubbing at a spot he finds on the next table over’s surface. “Unless you’d like to tell me your name?”

Kurogane squints, weighing his options. He hasn’t made the best decisions lately, but he still balks at the thought of trusting Fai, even with something as mundane as his name.

“Ah, I see. You’re the paranoid type.”

“Kurogane,” he spits, because the accusation rankles something in his bones. He doesn’t know why—he accepts his paranoia, but somehow hearing it like a joke…. It’s not his _true_ name anyway. Surely the creature can’t do much more to him with a use name. “You can call me Kurogane.”

“So then I was half right anyway!? Good to know, Mr. Kuro.” Fai looks far more self-satisfied than Kurogane has seen him since that first day, and Kurogane’s eyes narrow with suspicion. He doesn’t know what he expects with Fai—that adds to the distraction—but he certainly doesn’t expect the man to suddenly pull the empty chair opposite Kurogane’s away and plop down in it as if he belongs there. Fai sits balanced on the edge of the seat, one knee up in the air. Kurogane waits, anticipating a sudden fall or an endless drop that never comes. Does the blonde just intend to… Socialize?

Kurogane doesn’t know what to do from here. He long ago lost the ability to hold conversations with strangers outside a few terse sentences and demands. He frowns, glancing at his phone. He needs to get going soon anyway. He should mention as much.

“Do you have time to be bothering me?” he goads instead.

“Not much,” Fai agrees, before his eyes finally flash. Kurogane jolts as his sense of balance shifts without warning, air around him noticeably thinner as the café fades to an empty horizon. Somehow, despite the impossibility of it, their table and chairs tower above the landscape far below, thin limbs extending so far they seem to bend away from him. “So let’s make some, shall we? Don’t fall here, by the way. I wouldn’t be able to take you back.”

“ _Son of a_ —” He starts to curse, only to realize he doesn’t have enough air to manage the words. His mind struggles to comprehend the fact, lungs fluttering uselessly. By all accounts, without air he shouldn’t be able to maintain consciousness, but somehow his sight doesn’t so much as waver. He can see every instant of the empty torment of this realm and the full promise of an endless fall.

Fai watches him struggle with open disappointment. His own posture remains unchanged, perfectly comfortable with the distance between himself and the ground, one foot dangling unsupported in the open air. 

“Aw… that’s a shame. I thought maybe you were like me, but I guess not. I haven’t met someone like me in a long time.” Meaning Kurogane can’t catch lingers behind his words. The man pouts, dares to lean across the table and tap Kurogane directly on the nose. Distant thoughts of murder immediately rise to mind, but he can’t move. His body remains involuntarily still—paralyzed by tension and oxygen starvation. _How hasn’t he passed out ye_ t? “You’re brave, Kuro-sweetheart, but the Falling Titan needs more than bravery. Cling to your Paranoia instead, hmm? You’ll live longer.”

The sight of Fai blurs and Kurogane finds himself stranded there, teetering what looks like miles above a formless surface alone. He fights for an ounce of breath and grits his teeth. He doesn’t trust that guy as far as he could throw him, but it seems pointless to give life advice to people intended for impending death and something in this place has kept him from dying so far. He has enough bodily autonomy to close his eyes and he does, preparing himself to wait. The sense of vertigo Fai usually likes to throw his way always ends eventually—this _has_ to end too.

He doesn’t know how long he spends, waiting to hear something, anything other than the silence of thin air. When he blinks back to reality, he finds himself sitting at the table alone, coffee cup nearly crushed in his tense grip. He looks up and sees Fai tending the line at the counter as if nothing had happened at all.

 _Asshole,_ he thinks as he picks himself up from the very mundane café chair and throws the disposable cup away. His every limb is sore in the aftermath of tension and his very lungs ache as he marches unsteadily to the door, and _yet_ … the day ahead weighs far lighter on his thoughts.

Stupid, that tangling with Fai should make him feel so much more alive when he just _knows_ it will kill him eventually. This is nothing more than an unhealthy addiction to adrenaline. He should stop. Fai obviously has more power than a little vertigo. He should stop.

(Next Thursday, Fai throws him into a hallucination of an ocean that plunges deeper than any on earth, lets him catch the barest, impossible, lightless glimpse of the giant creature that slumbers beneath, so big that its eye fills Kurogane’s entire field of view. He spends the experience boredly wondering how asphyxiation and the incredible pressure of being so damn deep haven’t killed him yet.

Fai writes “Kuro-dummy” on his coffee before he hands it over, and as much as Kurogane wants to punch him for it, he can’t say the epithet is undeserved.

He doesn’t hear the pipes at all that day, but the smell of saltwater doesn’t leave him for a week.)

* * *

Kurogane wrestles with work and his nightmares both, newly bolstered distrust of everything around him only lending itself to the constant tension that surrounds him like a cloud. For the most part, his dreams stick to a few core themes—violence, music, dark memories that combine the two. But at the very least, they remain dreams. In his waking hours, the only nightmares he faces come from the usual operations of Artifact Storage.

Or… he had thought he could separate the two. But that morning as he walks to work from the station, he hears the distant sound of Music on the chill spring breeze.

It might seem like nothing at all, but he recognizes the difference between the sound of a song, and _the Song_ that resonates bone and blood through the worst of his nightmares. Even distant, even muted, he knows the discomfiting lilt of that tune. It reaches out to him—beckoning from the shadows of a well-kept alleyway like a siren.

He shouldn’t follow. He _knows_ he shouldn’t, but he’s struggled with these dreams for months now and if he could hunt down the thing causing them… Kurogane glances both ways, makes sure no one on the street has eyes on him, and turns toward the sound.

Chelsea is a stupidly posh neighborhood—people here can afford to keep small gardens and pretty courtyards, even this close to central London. So at least he has pleasant scenery to look at as he winds a path between private flats that he will never be able to afford, ears tuned to the Song and eyes straining to catch a glimpse of the thing behind it. He keeps one hand wrapped around the knife-hilt in his pocket, ready to draw.

Behind a brick townhouse, around a car that costs more than he’ll ever see in his life, past a flowering privacy wall just blossoming with new, pink buds—the sound of distant pipes leads him deeper. He catches glimpses of something just around the next bend with every turn. He can’t tell what the hell it is, but once or twice he thinks he sees red lines on pale flesh.

Kurognae’s skin crawls, hair standing on end as he picks up the pace. He breaks into a run, certain he’ll come upon it any second. The music surges, so _clear_ but just a little further. It leads him into turn after turn—he must have run a circle by now—no city block in Chelsea winds this long or this far. He should have come back out to a street meters and meters ago, but—

His steps stutter to a sudden stop as he rounds the next corner and finds a dead end. The sound cuts—ended by some invisible conductor and the world falls deathly still. Nothing stirs, not even the wind.

Slowly, Kurogane frees the knife from its sheath, fingers tight at the hilt. He scans the area, looking up and down, in shaded windows and up to third story rooftops. Where the fuck did it—

“ _Wheet-woo,_ Kuro-sharp. Didn’t take you for the criminal type.”

He whirls at the unexpected voice, every instinct screaming. His hands move on reflex, driving the blade forward, and he only just stops himself from gutting the idiot barista from Cat’s Eye at the last damn second.

“What the _fuck_.” Kurogane growls, fury rising in the face of Fai’s unflappable cheer. The blonde doesn’t bother to move a muscle, placid smile wide and strange, blue eyes glinting. “You—I could have…” _I could have killed you just now_ , he thinks to say, except he doesn’t know whether that’s true. He doesn’t know anything about Fai or the extent of his powers. For all he knows, Fai is the origin of the Song, and he’s been toying with him this whole time. He doesn’t like the thought—part of him has already come to kind of like the creature on some level, but he can’t deny the possibility. He stills his nerves, eyes narrowing as he stares the asshole down.

“My goodness, that’s quite a look,” Fai laughs.

“You had better tell me the truth,” Kurogane raises the knife to the level of Fai’s throat, but if the barista cares he gives no indication. “Are you the one that led me here?”

“Led you here? Ah. I see. That does explain it. I wondered how you wound up in something else’s realm.”

“Stop trying to confuse me and answer the damn question.” He presses, bringing the blade just a little closer. Fai rolls his eyes and reaches up to push the weapon away.

“No, dummy. That wasn’t me. I just followed.”

Kurogane hums uncertainly, but without a reason to push… He starts to step away, only for long fingers to catch, warm around his wrist. Fai’s grip is deceptively strong—his attention captured by the old, white scar that paints the back of Kurogane’s hand. “That’s an interesting Mark…” he muses, and Kurogane has to wonder whether he imagines the emphasis on that word.

He doesn’t know why it should draw Fai’s scrutiny, or what makes the damn thing special. It’s just a scar—star-shaped and old enough he can’t remember how he even got it. He must have put his hand on a nail or something at some point. He doesn’t think it matters. ( ~~He knows deep down that it very much does. Didn’t that scar show up around the time—?~~ )

“Let _go._ ” Fai smiles in the face of his discomfort, but he complies anyway. Blue eyes watch, unnervingly constant as Kurogane puts the knife back in its place.

“Something like that’s not exactly legal, is it?” The creature lilts, amusement written all over his face.

“Are you going to turn me in?” Kurogane hardly thinks the man who throws people into vertigo-inducing hallucinations for fun has room to talk about illegal weapons, but then again there isn’t much on the books about the legality of supernatural powers.

Fai laughs, unrestrained and honest and the sound eases something in Kurogane he still doesn’t quite understand.

“And lose my favorite customer?” He grins. “Perish the thought! No. It can stay our dirty little secret for now.”

“You really don’t have to say it like that.”

“I really, _really_ do.” Kurogane suppresses the confusing dual urges to either wipe that stupid look off Fai’s face or try to tame his wild, blond hair. Fai is a strange eldritch being who just cornered him and possibly made him lose the only lead he’s found so far on the nightmares—he needs to keep that reality in mind.

Somehow, he has trouble doing that when Fai keeps _smiling_ at him that way.

“Come on Mr. Black. Back to the real world with you,” Fai teases, and with a flash of blue he tosses Kurogane, cursing, into another of his towering, breathless dreamscapes.

“ _That’s not my name!_ ” He tries to shout before the transition takes hold, but his lungs struggle, unable to form the syllables. Kurogane grits his teeth and starts to find his way over the rope bridge twisting beneath his feet, veins pumping with adrenaline and head empty of the Song.

* * *

Slowly, _slowly_ , his trips to the café become less about morbid curiosity and the rush of danger, and more about Fai himself.

Stupid, Kurogane knows. He has no idea who or what Fai is. He should _know_ better. He’s seen people killed by their fascinations in Storage. He knows enough to recognize a similar obsession in himself now. But that doesn’t make it easier to stop.

It starts simply enough:

“Good morning Mr. Black,” Fai chimes, the flash of his eyes a threat he doesn’t intend to push.

“You do know my name now. You could at least use it,” Kurogane grouches back. He doesn’t bother to order a coffee out loud and Fai doesn’t need to ask. The blonde has already started punching whatever register buttons he needs for the usual order.

“I could, but what would be the fun in that? Besides, it’s not like you ever use mine.” He has to pause at the accusation—nearly fumbles the act of paying for his drink as he juggles his thoughts and loose change. Has he really never…?

It’s easy to think of Fai as a creature he doesn’t understand or an artifact made human. He’s attractive and seems fun, if a little… _much_ for Kurogane. Maybe he has trouble holding all of that in his head at once. Maybe he hasn’t given the thought of Fai _the person_ its proper due? (Maybe he’s setting himself up for a fall, quite literally)

“Order up,” the subject of his thoughts smiles at him across the counter, holding his large black coffee hostage above its surface. His gaze glints with that telltale glow and Kurogane knows he’ll wind up pulled into that other world the instant he makes contact. It’s a challenge, and his blood runs too hot not to meet it.

“Thanks, Fai,” he tries the name on his tongue as he reaches out and takes the drink. It still doesn’t settle right in his head, but he hasn’t thought of a good alternative yet. Something tells him Shitty Barrista won’t fly well and Throws-people-randomly-into-an-eldrich-realm-of-eternal-falling is way too long. It doesn’t matter. His fingers close around the cup and he waits for the sensation of thin air or eternal sinking.

It doesn’t come.

Fai’s eyes lose their strange glint as Kurogane’s words register, and he stares blankly instead. He’s re-formatting, trying to put the pieces of what just happened back together. Something smug and ever so slightly fond settles in Kurogane’s chest and refuses to budge. He steps off to the side, taking his coffee with him with no drop into eldritch space to show for it.

“You…!” the blonde pouts once he gathers himself. By that time the next customer has already stepped up to order. Fai doesn’t seem to care. “You cheated, Kuro-meanie!”

“What are you talking about? I just did what you asked me to.”

“I didn’t ask!... technically.”

“Um, excuse me?” the woman at the front of the line presses. Fai ignores her to shout at Kurogane’s retreating back instead.

“Just you wait for tomorrow morning! I’ll serve you something you’ll never forget!”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Kurogane laughs as he opens the door, the sound strange in his ears. He walks back to the Institute with the hint of a smile tugging at his face. No adrenaline and no dive but he still somehow feels better for the visit. He starts to think maybe… maybe? He doesn’t know how to complete the thought yet.

Time ticks on, the days pass. He doesn’t have to wait long before that missing thought occurs to him again.

Fai settles in at his table on one of the rare afternoons Kurogane has escaped the Institute for lunch and sets a plate dotted with pastries down between them. The afternoon light casts an amber glow through the café that makes his hair look like spun gold. He has it pulled back—low, just enough to bare the nape of his neck when he moves, and Kurogane valiantly ignores his own definite interest at the sight.

“Can I help you?” He prods, because he has never learned how to interact with people correctly, and much as he secretly thrills at Fai’s attention the asshole can never know.

“Isn’t that what I should be asking?” he shoots back, mouth quirked in a grin, eyes flickering with the promise of another fall. Kurogane meets his impossibly blue gaze without second thought. His heart beats a rapid staccato in his chest, anticipating the moment he might see reality fade out of view, but it doesn’t budge. Fai’s stare sharpens. “I start to wonder what you get out of this, Kuro-crazy.”

He tries to make the statement sound casual, like a joke, but Kurogane hears the clear suspicion. He tuts, finally looking down to his cup again instead. The answer eludes him. He thinks of dreams and work and the strange connection he’s found in Fai… He can’t put any of it to words.

“Passable coffee.”

“Aw come on,” the blonde badgers, sighing with his whole body. He leans so far backward Kurogane thinks for sure he’ll fall, but he doesn’t, swinging back upright just as his chair starts to tilt sideways. Fai lets the seating settle, picks up a Danish from the pastry dish and takes an aggressive bite before he continues. “The people I… _interact_ with tend to visit once, and leave. That’s half the point! It might have made sense if you were like me, but you have no connection with It.”

“Connection with what?” He can’t help the curiosity that plagues him. However ill-advised, he does _want_ to know more about Fai—why he can do what he does, why he bothers to do it at all. Is he like the Artifacts, or a different paranormal thing entirely? The object of his scrutiny sighs with exasperation-gesturing with his half-eaten pastry as he talks.

“With the Falling Titan! The thing that makes that other place—” He cuts himself off, expression tightening with suspicion. “You don’t even know that much? What _are_ you doing?”

“I told you. Coffee’s alright and it’s close to where I work.” Kurogane grouches, trying not to resent the change of subject. He would know more about these things if Fai actually saw fit to _explain_ , but he doesn’t think now is the time to press. He glances at the pastries instead, deciding whether he cares to try any of them. The unidentified dark chocolate on the corner seems safe enough. (Unless it can secretly portal him back to the high place with no air, his paranoia reminds him blandly. He squashes the thought.)

“Kuro-liar, I throw you into the sort of shit most people have nightmares about. For fun. I _know_ the fall frightens you. The vertigo still hits—you get shaky and stumble like all the rest. Why do you keep putting yourself through it? There has to be a reason.”

He doesn’t know what to say. Yes, that other place can still set his heart racing and his head swimming, but it’s not… it doesn’t hit home. It’s an animal panic, not the soul-twisting agony of the things that really plague him. How does he explain that the sort of fright Fai pushes him into pales in comparison to his own dreams? He can’t. He stuffs the chocolate thing in his mouth instead.

Ugh. Raspberry filling. Kurogane chases the taste with coffee and hopes the face he pulls isn’t _too_ undignified. Fai doesn’t laugh, so he probably succeeds.

“Are you just some kind of adrenaline junkie?”

“Look, can you drop it? I’m… there are worse things. Than falling,” his heart pounds, this time for real as he struggles through an attempt at honesty. Fai’s focus pins him in place, endless blue, unchanged by the golden light.

“For you, I suppose that’s true.” He almost seems to stare through Kurogane. For the barest moment, the floor falls away beneath their feet, and air freezes in his lungs.

The feeling passes quickly. He takes another deep draw of coffee. Fai finishes his Danish with a flourish and wipes his fingers on the edge of his apron. “You ought to stop coming back, Kuro-dummy. One of these days I’m going to drop _you_ and it’ll stick.”

“If you say so,” he agrees, more annoyed by the continued mutilation of his name than the threat. He watches Fai waltz back to the counter, gold and blue and a way of moving that makes him seem like a being of air himself. He thinks about worry and suspicion and the way Fai acts and thinks maybe…

No. No, far too soon for that. He resolves not to dwell on that particular thought longer. He thinks he starts to see the shape of it, inchoate though it is, and he does not need that right now, thank you very much.

His heart does not seem to care what he needs.

At some point in late Spring, he looks up to see Fai, chin pressed to his hands with his elbows on the counter and that smug look on his face. Kurogane jolts back to himself after another trip through the sky that never ends. He shakes his head, re-acclimating to the twin sensations of gravity and solid ground beneath his feet.

“Black coffee as usual, Kuro-stubborn? Or did you forget your wallet?” Fai calls the challenge, his usual invitation for Kurogane to give up and walk out.

“Do you really need to keep asking?” He puts cash on the counter instead, exact change, and if he has to lean a little harder than usual against the bar to keep his balance at least Fai has the courtesy not to mention it. Kurogane shuffles to the side to wait for coffee amidst the usual morning crowd. He watches as the object of his fascination trades places with a coworker for the cash register and starts filling drinks. Up, goes a latte, then a terribly sweet concoction that makes his mouth hurt just watching Fai pour the syrup in, then some iced monstrocity. Customers mill behind him to take their purchases, but he scarcely registers them as more than background noise. He focuses on Fai as the man finally—

Fai picks up the black marker beside the espresso machine and starts writing on the surface of the cup that should belong to Kurogane.

“So where do you work?”

Between the strangeness of Fai’s scrawling, the lingering aftereffects of the Falling place, and the unexpected question, Kurogane blanks.

“What?”

“Where do you work?” Fai repeats. His marker traces a long line that cannot possibly create any letter Kurogane knows. Is he drawing? “You mentioned that this place is close to where you work the other day. I’ve been curious.”

Kurogane watches as Fai’s hand pulls at a long diagonal, then leads the marker on a series of zig-zags… definitely drawing. He frowns, unsure whether he can answer. The Institute is by definition the sort of place that would love to study Fai. He thinks of the empty glass cases in Area U and tries not to imagine blue eyes staring back from within.

“No place interesting,” he lies instead, when the truth makes him too paranoid to speak aloud.

“Seriously? You keep showing up here despite my best attempts and you won’t even tell me a _little_ about yourself?” the blonde whines, hint of a smile still played across his face. He keeps his focus pinned on whatever unholy doodle he’s crafting. Kurogane rolls his eyes.

“There isn’t much to tell.”

“Kuro-reckless, you are the sort of person who keeps showing up to get knowingly thrown into a hellscape. You have got to be at least a little interesting.” Apparently satisfied with his work, Fai caps the marker and picks the cup up to _finally_ fill it with coffee. The other worker on shift, a tall woman with her hair curled in tight ringlets, has to step forward to let him slide by. She barely seems to notice the move. Fai slips back in moments and shoots another teasing grin in Kurogane’s direction. “You ought to talk more. Baristas are supposed to be like bartenders, right? Discount therapy.”

“No one says that.”

“Well, I do!” Fai completes the simple drink with a plastic lid and a cardboard sleeve that proclaims its eco-friendliness. The heat-barrier does nothing to disguise the cartoon that Fai has sketched on the cup’s surface—a little black dog with a dour expression and a raincloud above its head labeled “ _Kuro-woof._ ” Kurogane stares at it for a moment, caught half-way between unholy awe and an instant desire for revenge. “Hit me, big guy! What’s your poison? Cheating girlfriend? Strained relationship with your father?”

He glances from the doodle to the smiling face behind the bar, fully aware that Fai only means to tease at this point. Kurogane doesn’t budge, letting the monstrosity sit on the counter as he glares the asshole down.

“Fai, four more on the line.” The woman at the register calls softly and Fai grimaces. Eldrich creature or no, he is still subject to the demands of time and the imposing line of customers.

“Be right there,” he calls back. “Kuro-grumpy, I hate to chat and run on this _riveting_ conversation, but—”

A smirk twists its way across Kurogane’s face, surprising Fai out of the rest of his sentence. He leans in over the bar, letting the corner press into his chest to loom closer.

“I have no living family, no friends, and my job will probably kill me before the year is out.” His scarred hand snakes forward and takes the damn coffee, and he backs away, pleased by Fai’s shocked expression.

“Is that a… joke? I can’t actually tell,” the blonde blinks, but Kurogane has found his small revenge. The truth of the words doesn’t matter. Contentment curls like a cat in his chest as he watches Fai struggle with the idea. He doesn’t bother to clarify, turning to walk away instead.

“Hey, you can’t just say something like that and leave!”

“Watch me!” He actually laughs as the shop door rings behind himself, and it doesn’t sound like the hymn of battle, not even a little bit. His good mood lasts through an incident with a painting that has somehow crawled its way six storage areas east of its original position and he thinks about Fai and _maybe_ …

Fuck.

No… if he can just ignore that thought long enough, he can make it disappear. Messy feelings have no place in his life. Not with his job and the complication of his burgeoning nightmares. His heart can shut up.

He manages to quiet it for all of a week or two.

Kurogane doesn’t like walking home at sunset, usually. The way light plays over the clouded sky and casts the world in red reminds him too much of things he would rather forget, but the summer brings long days and if he spends another hour arguing with the accounting through passive aggressive paperwork he is finally going to kill someone.

He doesn’t know what drives him to walk past the Cat’s Eye Café when he already knows it should be closed, but he’s glad for the urge when he catches sight of Fai locking the café door. The dying sunlight catches on his hair and stupidly fair skin—makes him almost seem to glow. He looks for just a moment like a person spun from sunlight and for the first time in a long time Kurogane doesn’t associate warm red with the thought of blood.

His mouth opens, but Kurogane loses the words before he can decide what to say. He has too many things he wants to ask—why Fai is locking up when Kurogane knows he pulled a shift this morning, why he’s just leaving now an hour after closing, where he goes at night and whether they should walk to the station together and a hundred thousand other stupid things that pile up in his head and clutter the path to his throat. He swallows instead, watches Fai head East, and he knows that maybe—he is completely doomed.

“You look tired, Kuro-sleepy,” Fai soothes the morning after another nightmare, and adds a shot of espresso to his cup. The idiotic heart the dumbass doodles on the exterior has him rolling his eyes, but maybe Kurogane takes it with him and maybe he looks at it through the day when he finds himself back at his desk.

And somewhere, between the endless cups of coffee and constant falling in that other place and the eternal struggle to forget his every sleeping moment—between the frustrations at work and crowds of café patrons and barbs traded across a counter and over a table and in a place that never ends, _maybe_ he begins to fall in love. Just slightly. Just enough.

His nightmares shift, start to cycle. A battlefield, a slaughter, a droning reel of horrible memories, but now the endless ocean where he sinks eternally too. The water is awash with red and the smell of iron replaces the sting of salt, but he knows he has invited it here. He has only himself to blame. (He doesn’t know whether he minds)


	3. Prelude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prelude - an introductory piece of music, most commonly an orchestral opening to an act of an opera, the first movement of a suite, or a piece preceding a fugue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ***Blood picks up in this chapter*** fair warning Kuro's nightmares get pretty wild from here out. But ALSO- there is Hand Holding so please do not think I am only a monster.

* * *

The Magnus Institute’s Artifact Storage department stands apart from the Storage and Handling or Preservation or Curation departments of most other institutes. Certainly, like those other places, it has a long list of protocols and procedures for the preservation of its collection. It accepts donations and pursues desirable acquisitions, maintains logs of specimens removed for educational use or otherwise relocated, and facilitates… research on the Institute’s chosen subjects.

 _Unlike_ those other esteemed halls of learning, Artifact Storage has very few employees with any kind of degree relevant to collections, preservation, curation, or library science. Kurogane himself serves as an example of the Magnus Institute’s strange hiring decisions. He’d applied as a university drop out with so little conception of the position and its demands that he hadn’t even realized his C.V. had lacked anything when he submitted it. He hasn’t decided yet whether the Institute has some kind of stake in leveling the academic playing field, or whether the danger of the Storage job simply necessitates a different sort of qualification, but he’s leaning toward the latter.

After all, the workplace fatality rate in Artifact Storage really _does_ stand a cut above the rest. It’s only mid-summer and they’ve already lost two newbies. No bodies, but neither quit, and the only reasonable assumption for a Storage worker is… well… Kurogane thinks the print of _Saturn Devouring his Son_ carefully contained in the humidity-controlled room has been feeling a little smug lately.

In any case, the danger of Artifact Storage gives it an entirely different outlook from other preservationist departments. Most archives maintain preservation and storage units with specialized access protocols and registration lists and admission checkpoints to protect their collections from the public. Artifact Storage has those things too, but Kurogane doesn’t think it’s the collection they’re protecting. The death rate here is high enough without adding idiot members of the public and researchers too curious for their own good into the mix.

So, when he finds the unknown woman staring at a wax figurine in the maze of area W, he quite understandably startles, reaching for the knife hidden at his side. She turns and faces him before he can draw it.

She looks human enough—no awkward joins or painted-on features to mark her for a mannequin, no wildly extended limbs or monstrous teeth, _and yet_. The restless itch in his fingers urges him to pull his blade, danger ringing in his head.

“Are you the Archivist?” she asks, her large, dark eyes blank. She has her curly hair pulled back tight, away from her face. Both her hands are gloved, and he realizes with a terrible sense of dread that she is touching the display glass.

“Step away from the artifacts,” He growls, ready to pull the knife if she so much as moves wrong. Just a beat of silence passes between them before she lets the offending limb fall to her side. If she has any issue with his aggression, she doesn’t show it.

“Are you the Archivist?” she asks again, blank and toneless as a doll. Kurogane waits to answer. He dare not take his attention away from the objects in the glass, mentally counting to be sure all are accounted for—a broken mirror, a jewel that never catches light, and a wax figurine patterned with intricately engraved, crossing lines. All three items meet his inspection, but the claxon of alarm in his head does not cease. “I’d like to give a statement.”

“You’re in the wrong place for that.” She can’t possibly have wandered through the clutter of Storage to nearly its furthest area by accident. The Archives take statements, he knows, but the corridors are clearly marked, and the receptionist should have directed her there without issue. Uncertainty and paranoia render his tone harsh. “This area’s closed to the public. Come on.”

Kurogane herds her back toward the door, careful not to touch her and wary of the scent of gasoline that cloaks her person like a cloud. She goes where he urges without protest, the perfect picture of compliant contrition. He doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t know who or what she is, but her presence buzzes in his awareness as loud as any artifact. He half expects her to throw him somehow into the High Place, but then that doesn’t seem quite right either. She triggers the same animal panic at the back of his mind that Fai does, but... not the same way. Almost as if fear could have _flavors_.

His instincts have not stopped urging him to gut her where she stands by the time they reach the floor where the Archives rest, but she’s made no move to force his hand. She spots the receptionist’s desk before he can point it out and wanders over, taking her leave of Kurogane with only the barest nod of recognition.

“Here to give a statement, dear? I’ll get you set up,” the receptionist smiles, all congeniality, though she stops herself from touching the woman’s shoulders to comfort her when she guides her toward the archives. She knows, Kurogane realizes. He thought only Artifact Storage had any idea of the true nature of the paranormal, but the Archives’ receptionist, Rosie, must recognize something in that woman. And if she _knows_ , then…

He hadn’t realized, before Fai, that people could be like artifacts. And even after, he’d started to think… maybe Fai was unique or something. But now there are others. Other creatures, finding their way into the Institute and marching through the front door. Is this just something that _happens_ here? What does that mean for Kurogane? How many monstrous people with the feel of otherness hanging over their presence mill through London on a daily basis? Were they formed that way?

Are they transformed?

Kurogane’s hands shake. His fingers _ache_ to hold his blade, every inch of him singing with wary dread. Something is not right. He needs… He feels trapped by an urge he cannot even name. He has to excise it, cut the wrongness free from the world, but he doesn’t—

“Oh by the way, Mr. Suwa?” Rosie steps back into the room, shaking him from his unbidden reverie. Kurogane blinks away the wave of thoughts that don’t belong to him and clenches his teeth as he stares her down. “Could you let the others in Storage know you’ve a delivery scheduled for this afternoon? The director managed to secure a few things yesterday—slipped my mind to mention before now.”

“Yeah… not a problem,” he bites, and watches as she smiles and returns to the Archives and presumably the statement giver. Kurogane turns on his heel and marches back to Storage. He has worked here too long not to have a sense for these things, and he can feel it like a song in his bones—something terrible is coming.

Kurogane presses idly at the shape of the hilt hidden at his thigh and tries not to think too deeply on the way his every footstep begins to sound like the cadence of a drum.

* * *

_What brought these dreams to Kurogane? Shattered his sleep and filled his days with the distant echoes of a violent refrain?_

_He wonders sometimes. One too many movies? The wrong manga? Perhaps he simply needs an outlet for all the frustrations he keeps pent up, unable to unleash on the traffic and the noise and the stupidity he sees around himself._

_Perhaps the problem lies deeper. Maybe it has always been there inside him—a sickness waiting to boil his mind. He used to get in a lot of fights. He remembers breaking a kid’s nose once near the end of high school—remembers how much he enjoyed it. The prick had said something that made him so angry and he’d just—_

_Funny, he can’t remember what the kid said. Why it mattered. But he only needs to close his eyes to relive the sensation of bone fracturing under his fist. The sound had rung in his ears and driven his satisfaction, blinding him to the pain of his own busted knuckles. His guardian had tried to set him right afterward—had to pull a lot of strings to keep away from any kind of pressed charges. Kurogane does feel guilty for making her work so hard, but not… not for hurting that shitty kid. He knows he’s supposed to. A few more ounces of force and he’d have sent bone shards into the kid’s brain. He should feel some kind of remorse. He does, sometimes, for other people. Other fights he won. Not that one._

_Is that the beginning?_

_He can’t be sure._

_He never tortured any helpless creatures, never bullied kids smaller than him or picked a fight with anyone who didn’t deserve it but always, he knows, he kept this… anger. Burning in his blood. Every new foster home before Sonomi found him, every shitty comment, every disappointed teacher, every lost friend and skipped meal and stolen belonging banked it higher and higher. Tearing it out of other people used to seem like the only way to get rid of it._

_He didn’t have the Song before the nightmares came, did he? He recognizes it like an old friend—it fits too easily into the paths that anger wore inside him. Did the anger call it? Has he always been doomed to hear the Piper’s tune?_

_No, he thinks unbidden. No… there’s something deeper still._

(He listens to the not-quite-sound of the thing that seems to know him, content to let it play through his life until the scenery shifts. He expects the battlefield again. He expects the knife in his hand and the Song in his ears. He does not expect the warm concrete of an unassuming, quiet neighborhod on a late summer day.

His heart plummets.)

_Kurogane hadn’t been very old the day the world ended. Nine maybe. Ten. The years blur together when he thinks about it too deeply. He tries so hard to forget, but the scene has never really left him, has it?_

_Such a mundane day—so boring and utterly typical in every way except its ending. He never could have known when his mother sent him off to school that morning what he would find when he came home._

(No. He doesn’t want to watch this. He doesn’t _need_ it. Kurogane struggles to control his dream self—to turn, face away from the nightmare ahead. His child’s body only stumbles slightly.)

_Father had been such a principled lawyer, hadn’t he? So noble. He never prosecuted a case he didn’t believe was guilty. The serial killer he put away last had been guilty too. Such a nasty piece of work—execution with firearm, ritual dismemberment of the victims. His messy kills left a trail of evidence eventually, far too cocky for his own good._

_The trial had been the talk of the town. So many eyes on the details, so much noise. How could they all have missed that man’s accomplice?_

(Stop it, stop it, stop it—The way home looks exactly as he remembers. Concrete and manicured lawns and carefully groomed houses in suburbia. He hates the perfect red of the sunset because he _knows_ what comes next. He doesn’t want to see—)

_The house is dark when he gets home. He remembers finding it strange as he jogs up to the front door. Father finished that last case a few days earlier than expected and he planned to come home early. Kurogane had spent an extra hour out with a friend—all prearranged and parentally approved of course. What had they been doing? Reading comics, maybe. He thinks he used to do that once._

_The door swings open to his touch. Something is wrong with the handle. Is it broken? He knows he saw mother turn it just this morning. He puts his unused house key back in his pocket, uncertainty swimming in his thoughts._

(Wake up. Just wake up—tune it out! He knows how the story ends. He could never forget.

Kurogane struggles for control against the puppeteer that walks his body through memory. He thinks unbidden of the time he spent breathless and frozen in his own body at an impossible height. All he’d needed then was to close his eyes and wait. Just close his eyes… His childhood home slides behind a vision of his eyelids. At least he has this much control.)

_In the end, the smell keyed him in to the scene before anything else. He cannot wipe the iron tang of blood and the stench of human viscera from his memory no matter how he plays at forgetting the rest. He follows the smell to the kitchen, house dark save for the thin light of dusk. It doesn’t matter. He sees them easily enough, murdered like all the killer’s victims before them._

_He remembers, doesn’t he? How in his childish grief he’d tried to put them back together again. Arm to torso, foot to leg, but people are so much more fragile than pottery—so much messier when they shatter._

(Keep. The eyes. Shut. He knows he must be dreaming. This has already happened. He has grown older, and he has nothing new to fear. Keep them shut—pay no attention the dripping that seems to echo through his thoughts or the memory of drying blood on his hands. Think of something—anything else. Think of falling. Think of the smell of the ocean and the eye in the deep. Think of an impossible mouth on the horizon, and an empty sea of sky that stretches on forever. Think of—)

_Does he remember what comes next? No. Perhaps not. Perhaps he has hidden the truth of himself behind the veneer of humanity and time’s gentle drug. Still, the truth does not change simply because he has forgotten it. Not even the Vast’s infinite reach could smother it. It dwells in his past, a poison to reach down to the present, call the dreams and drive him toward the edge of Slaughter._

_What an irony; to hurtle toward the same patron as the one who killed them. Will he even realize as much when he finally slips into the Song for the last time?_

(Think of Fai. Think of blond hair and blue eyes and a stranger who worries for no reason. Think of black coffee and stupid nicknames and—)

Kurogane tears out of sleep, sitting bolt upright and wide-eyed as the altered memory leaves him. He waits, heartbeat racing in the dark but no voice reaches out to taunt him. No tune echoes in his head. He’s…. awake?

He shutters with wary relief, skin crawling with disgust as he struggles to put the memories back and away. He slumps, moves to put his head in his hands only to recognize the damn knife between his fingers.

“Fuck!” He flings the weapon away, unable to care as it plunges into the drywall and hangs there. It hadn’t been sheathed.

Only the light of the streetlights breaks through his window as he lunges out of bed and fumbles for less sweat-soaked clothing. The sun has an hour or more before it debuts for the day but he doesn’t _care_. He knows where he has to go. He needs…

He has a feeling he only made it out of that dream with his sanity so intact because at the end he’d thought about Fai…. It could just be coincidence, but what if the blond can help? Perhaps he knows a way to silence songs and memories for good. Sure this might not end well, but it could hardly end _worse_ than…

Kurogane picks up his wallet, jaw set. He needs coffee. He leaves the knife.

* * *

The street is strangely empty in the grey, clouded light of dawn as he makes his way over broad pavements and past still-closed shops. The cars never cease and a few stray early busses slide past as he walks but there are almost no pedestrians. The city feels strangely empty.

He doesn’t know what he plans to do or how he thinks Fai can help but he is _desperate_ to leave the dreaming behind. Nearly a two-hour commute from his flat to Chelsea taking night busses, and he spends the whole time jumping at shadows. The dream would have been bad enough on its own, but he keeps hallucinating. Reflections of memories in the dark glass of the windows, the feeling of blood caked and drying on his skin, the color of the sunrise, the death-pale faces of the few passers-by—He wants to close his eyes to shut the world out but he knows that won’t make it stop. He doesn’t know what will, but he hopes—

Fai stands out among the gloom, too tall and thin on the horizon for just a second before Kurogane’s vision settles. His attention is occupied on the key in his hand as he unlocks the Cat’s Eye Café.

Kurogane’s steps, purposeless but hurried, carry him towards the blonde, pulled forward as surely as the gravity of a fall. He doesn’t know what he plans to say, what he wants, but he runs out of time to ponder. He stutters to a halt just a few steps away from his almost-maybe-only friend. Fai pauses with the door already open, eyes drawn to Kurogane’s reflection in the glass.

“You’re around early Kuro-bir—oh.” He interrupts himself as he turns to catch a full glimpse of Kurogane’s disheveled state. Whatever he sees gives him pause. Kurogane wonders what he must look like—whether something about Fai’s mystical nature lets Fai see the blood on his hands. Does it work like that? The blonde stares for a beat of silence, calculation playing behind his faintly worried gaze.

“I know it’s early, but …” Kurogane doesn’t know how to end the sentence. He flounders, pinned in place by Fai’s searching expression.

What had he been thinking? He should just go. Fai doesn’t have anything to do with the nightmares, and he will sound absolutely unhinged if he just starts offloading his traumatic memories on someone little better than a stranger. “I… something came up at work. I was just on my way in.”

“You’re a terrible liar.” Fai finally breaks his quiet with a grin that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He lets the glass door swing back closed and locks it right back up again, sliding the key in his pocket. “Alright then, let me walk you there.”

Fai holds out a hand, eyes too blue in his face. Kurogane knows with absolute certainty that Fai will send him somewhere if he grabs hold, but with his thoughts spiraling like this... He reaches out anyway.

Blue eyes flash and Fai dances around him to take the lead just as the real world falls away. The street warps and slides down, twisted and distorted like oil on water until the topography settles stories and stories away. All around them, an impossible scaffold sprouts and spirals up into the grey sky, rickety and creaking.

Fai doesn’t bother to slow down as the scenery changes, just keeps his grip on Kurogane and starts walking forward, one foot in front of another across a piece of wood no more than five centimeters wide. Kurogane struggles to follow, still reeling from the dream and trying not to think about how much he weighs and whether a beam like this should be able to hold him. (He doesn’t see any kind of weights on either end to hold the plank down. Can it really take them both without bowing? The ground is so far away he can scarcely see the cars below. Is he sure—) Adrenaline kicks off in his veins and his head swims with vertigo but he _doesn’t care_. He focuses on the space where their palms meet and realizes that for the first time since waking, he no longer sees the rust-brown of drying blood.

He could collapse with relief, but he knows he doesn’t have that option. Not here. Fai tethers him to the world with little more than his grip as they teeter impossibly far above the London skyline.

“Sorry for the venue; It’s the only way I know to lose your watcher.” Fai doesn’t seem to have any trouble with the thin air or the precarious walk, but then Kurogane never expected he would. He leads them across the first plank, under a beam, through a bit of metal and wood platforming that sways when they cross it, and on and on.

“Watcher?” He has just enough air to echo the word. Perhaps this place is different from the impossibly tall table Fai’d dragged him to before. Kurogane focuses on following, unable to do much more and thankful for it. The usual panic of Fai’s space settles in, comfortable in comparison to the torture of his own memories bleeding out into reality. All he can do is follow and try not to fall.

Fai shrugs, move jostling his arm and forcing Kurogane to adjust his balance with his heart in his throat. He holds tighter to Fai’s unusually cold hand, but the blond doesn’t seem to notice.

“Something was following you.” Fai chirps, with the barest glance over his shoulder. He pauses, tests a dangling steel beam before turning and leading them over a rickety scaffold instead. “Most things can’t step into this place. Best way I could think to lose it.”

Something following him? Had something unseen played into the nightmares? Is this a new haunt, or has Kurogane missed something all along?

By stumbling here… had he led it straight to Fai?

“I—” he starts to ask, forced to halt himself as he nearly loses focus and tips right off the rail-less catwalk. Fai keeps him upright with a grasp too strong for his apparent build, waits for him to steady before stepping forward again.

“Save it, Kuro-clumsy. We can talk on the other side.”

Irritation feeds his confidence and Kurogane manages to steady himself. Another shitty use of his name, and he starts to wonder whether Fai doesn’t just do this to distract him from his own storming thoughts. “Come on, I know a place with ice cream that opens early.”

* * *

For all his paranoia, it barely even occurs to Kurogane that Fai could easily have just left him there in the High Place amongst precarious paths. He knows instinctively that if he had fallen there, he would have fallen for eternity, but Fai doesn’t once let go and the fear settles. Kurogane starts to find a kind of blessed numbness, nothing buzzing in his head but the path forward and the sight of Fai’s hand in his. Even the panic of the heights starts to dull, or his weariness simply catches up and he just doesn’t have the energy to feel it. By the time Fai leads him to an unassuming park bench on perfectly solid ground, they’ve been back in reality for a while. He never noticed the change.

He doesn’t know what sort of place he expected Fai to lead him to, But the perfectly flat, well-manicured park he finds when he blinks doesn’t fit the bill. He stares at it, watching a jogger run by without really processing.

“You could have told me you were already Marked, you know?” Fai laughs, and shoves an honest-to-god ice cream cone in Kurogane’s face. “I mean, I kind of knew, but the honesty would have been nice.”

Kurogane reaches out to take it purely on instinct, so confused he doesn’t think to protest. Is he still dreaming? Is he losing his mind for real? He doesn’t even remember watching Fai step away, but there’s a stand not too far down the path and he must have. Kurogane frowns at the sweet slowly melting in his grip and waits for Fai to settle on the bench beside him. Of course, the eldritch barista can’t sit like a normal person. He balances on the bench arm instead, one foot on the bench’s center.

“All that stopping by, acting like you were interested in the Fall—such a tease!” Fai takes a bite of his own ice cream- something vaguely orange that smells like mango. He licks a melting drop from his upper lip without a second thought. 

“What?” Between his confusion, Fai’s unfamiliar proclamations and the distracting sight of Fai eating ice-cream just _slightly_ this side of provocatively, Kurogane struggles for coherency. He shuts his eyes tight and exhales. “Just—start over. What do you mean, ‘marked’?”

“You really have no idea?” Fai’s amusement goads his annoyance back into existence and Kurogane scowls, tearing his gaze away to stare at the mostly empty landscape of the flat city park. _Obviously,_ he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know jack shit, and he doesn’t like admitting it. He feels anger stir in his chest like a slumbering beast and exhales through his nose—he doesn’t need it. He doesn’t want to risk hearing the song.

Fai tuts, his strange blue eyes flickering with the lightless depths of an endless chasm. “Why did you come to me this morning?” Kurogane ends his staring contest with the park lawn and brings his attention back to Fai, considering. For just a second, Fai is quiet and predator still, all his usual masks discarded. Even with the mismatched ridiculousness of the ice-cream in his hand he looks… sharp. Cold.

“I don’t know,” Kurogane lets the words ring, stark and honest, gaze pinned to Fai’s.

“Come on, you can do a little better than—”

“I _don’t know_. Things were getting… my head was…” How the hell does he explain this? He grits his teeth, battling his own embarrassment. There’s no way to phrase this that doesn’t sound absolutely insane. “Nightmares.” Fai blinks.

“Nightmares?” he repeats, disbelief and humor married in his tone. Kurogane could scream out of pure awkward embarrassment. He settles for pinching the bridge of his nose with his free hand instead.

“They aren’t… _normal_ dreams. They’re exhausting, and they’ve started bleeding over into reality when I’m awake. Your weird vertigo thing makes it stop.”

“Does it?”

“Yeah.” He considers taking a bite of the melting cone just to give himself something to do to escape the awkwardness of this situation, but the stomach ache later won’t be worth it. Kurogane lets the palm blocking his face fall back to his lap and tries to gauge Fai’s reaction. The blonde seems honestly thoughtful, strange eyes unfocused.

“It’s true that things can’t follow there, so maybe it stands to reason…” He mumbles to himself, licking his ice-cream idly with a flick of his tongue that Kurogane is too upset to appreciate right now. “‘There are worse things than falling,’ I think you told me once.”

“…I did,” Kurogane assents, unnerved by Fai’s easy acceptance. The blond simply nods, and his smile crawls back into place.

“So that’s what it was! And here you had me thinking you were some sort of Hunter on my case. You really could have told me sooner, you know.” Fai gestures toward Kurogane with his dessert as he talks, right back in his usual full, flamboyant form. Kurogane’s brow furrows, lips tugging downward as suspicion creeps into his thoughts.

“…why are you acting like this makes sense?”

“Because it does!” Fai smiles, swinging one leg back and forth over the arm of the bench as he talks, and really he should not be able to balance like that, but what does an eldritch creature care about physics.

“Then explain it to me,” Kurogane grits. Anger builds in his chest, a low hum he wants to keep pretending isn’t there. The heat of frustration builds and he hadn’t heard the song last night, but If Fai keeps running him in circles he will—

A line of cold traces over his fingers, single stream of melted confection trailing over his hand and dropping toward the ground with a soft _plop_. So quiet, he shouldn’t be able to hear it over the distant rush of the city and the chirping of the park’s resident birds, but with memory fresh in his mind… The sound reminds him too much of something he just can’t shake. Kurogane stares at the place where it falls, temper just as quickly doused.

Fai regards him with a single raised eyebrow. He seems more amused than threatened.

“Your ice-cream is melting,” he prods. Kurogane exhales through his nose, all thoughts of figuring this out abruptly eliminated. He sets his jaw and tilts the damn thing to let the excess slosh free, shaking off as much of the mess as he can. His skin crawls with the sensation of viscous fluid between his fingers but at least he can see it. At least it’s not red.

“Here,” he grumbles, holding it out for Fai to take.

“I don’t need _two._ It’s supposed to be yours. I even got you the coffee flavor.” Fai pouts as he tries to wave Kurogane’s offer away.

Ah. Well. Coffee flavor. That was considerate, Kurogane guesses. He keeps his eyes pinned to a crack in the concrete, watching the tiny ant that scurries there. Damn it, it’s not that big of a deal, but somehow he still feels embarrassed when he has to admit,

“I can’t have milk.”

Kurogane had revealed two things today; first, that he’d used Fai as some sort of anti-nightmare relief, second, that he couldn’t tolerate lactose. Somehow Fai seems infinitely more offended by the latter.

“ _Seriously_ ,” he protests, glaring at Kurogane as if his biology had never developed an ability to accommodate dairy specifically to betray Fai in this moment. He grabs the offending sweet from Kurogane’s fingers and presses his own, partially eaten one in its place. “Mango sorbet then, Kuro-jerk.” Fai’s eyes glint in their strange way, and Kurogane thinks the idiot really would toss him into the high place if he doesn’t accept the trade. He takes it because he doesn’t know what else to do—because something a little too frantic to be humor catches like a bubble in his chest and makes him want to laugh. 

Fai pauses and does something borderline obscene with the coffee ice-cream to keep it from dripping further and Kurogane can’t help it. His mouth twists with the _worst_ kind of smile. He doesn’t understand a damn thing—why he’s here, why Fai suddenly seems more comfortable, why the dream lingers but seems stymied by Fai’s company. Why—why anything.

He bites at the edge of fucking _mango sorbet_ and hates it, definitely not thinking about things as childish as indirect kisses or the path carved by Fai’s mouth.

“Fuck it.” He sighs, and the sound of Fai’s laugh carries him through the rest of the day.


	4. Fugue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fugue -
> 
> 1.MUSIC  
> a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
> 
> 2.PSYCHIATRY  
> a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

* * *

Dreams come and go, but Kurogane has started to learn how to weather them. He has… he doesn’t know what to call the way Fai helps him. Friendship? A deeply unhealthy dependency on trips to an other-dimensional hellscape? (Probably both.)

In any case, he seems to have Fai’s support or at least his attention, though he doesn’t understand why after the absolute disaster of that conversation in the park. He doesn’t want to jinx it by asking. He tears himself out of the worst dreams with force of will and the memory of Fai and Falling. In the mornings, he stumbles his way to the café for coffee and a chance to clear his head. Fai grants him both with increasingly concerned glances, teases the hell out of him, and tries to feed him food he doesn’t like. It’s kind of nice, actually.

He doesn’t trust it for a second. Not that he worries Fai will do something unexpectedly evil, just… nice things never last this long.

At least work has continued to frustrate him according to its usual pattern. He _still_ doesn’t have new cases for that fucking umbrella yet, and it doesn’t have a long time left with its latest container. There’s a table missing from Area D that somehow no one saw fit to warn him about, so he can’t _wait_ to see how that bites him in the ass later. _Saturn Devouring his Son_ has begun to waft a smell not unlike rotting meat in the humidity-controlled room, and he is extra certain of his assessment regarding at least one of their missing newbies. They’ll have to figure out a way to cordon the painting off better. He’d really like to lock it in a fucking safe, but, surprise, his boss doesn’t like the idea of shutting it away somewhere they can’t _see it_.

To top it all off, ever since that unknown woman had made herself welcome in the Storage Area, the sense of impending doom has clamored through Kurogane’s head like a tolling bell that only grows louder with time. He often walks past the case he saw her touch, making it a part of his daily routine and wondering what else she might have disturbed before he caught her. He catalogues and checks and _re-_ checks the inventory along her path, makes a formal notice with his priority-challenged boss, and does not allow himself to relax for a single instant.

So he’s more annoyed than surprised when he hears the distant sound of shattered glass late that afternoon.

Kurogane growls to himself, dropping the acquisition files from last week back down to his desk with a satisfying _slap_. It’s Friday and the others called an early evening, so of _course_ he’s the only fucking person in the Storage offices right now. He pushes away from the desk and reaches for his knife, prepared to have it at the ready and go meet whatever danger now lurks among the display cases—

Except he doesn’t have it. He hasn’t touched the fucking thing since he woke up with it in hand and nearly lost his mind last week. It’s still decorating the drywall in his flat.

He mutters a string of curses below his breath and scans the desk for anything he could use. An old, heavy duty stapler gathering dust atop a filing cabinet near the door speaks to him—almost a half meter long with a prominent lever for stapling wide stacks of paper at once. Not very elegant, but it _is_ solid metal, and he bets with enough force the damn thing could brain a man. (He resolutely ignores the pieces of himself excited by the prospect of braining a man) Kurogane hefts the stapler in his right hand with only a little effort, holding it up like a bat.

For a second, he thinks of texting the department head and warning his coworkers just in case he doesn’t make it out on the other side of whatever this is. The echo of a strange liquid sound just down the hall convinces him to abandon the attempt. He’s not letting this damn thing get the drop on him while he plods away at his phone, and if the others walk into a trap tomorrow it’ll be their own damn fault anyway. He’s been _warning_ them all week.

(He does lament, just for a second, the fact he hadn’t thought to mention the possibility of dying horribly to an escaped artifact to Fai in any serious capacity. And maybe he kind of a _little bit_ regrets not having the man’s phone number… Does Fai have a phone?)

He shakes his own idiot thoughts away and stays cautious as he steps into the storage area. Light floods the room, but it casts just as many shadows to hide in. His gaze darts from corner to gap, searching for anything at all out of place, heavy-duty stapler at the ready. Nothing jumps out immediately. Storage rings eerily silent and still. He can almost feel the damn place watching him right back as he combs over its every inch. (He tries hard not to think about the distant hint of a song, begging to be heard)

On he steps, past the scattered collection of discarded furniture in area D, past the door to the temperature-controlled room (still locked) and through the small maze of separately-boxed books all stacked and cordoned off in L. Once or twice he thinks he hears something—a squelching, liquid echo that resounds so strangely he can’t possibly hope to find the source. He doesn’t need to. He has a sneaking suspicion he knows exactly where that broken case will be, and whatever artifact with it.

Sure enough, he finds the first shard of broken glass with his shoe near W and the same display he checked obsessively all week, kicking it accidentally across the hard floor. No hope of a surprise approach then, he thinks as glass clatters, a few smaller bits crunching under-foot. Kurogane grips the stapler tighter, knuckles white around the awkward rectangle that serves as its base. He steps around the corner into the rows of cases that comprise W and finds—

Kurogane scans the displays, noting the clear break in the glass of W-12, originating almost in the exact fucking spot he’d seen that woman touch it. He has to take a few steps closer to try to see what might be missing. Both the lightless jewel and the shattered mirror still sit in their places, if a little askew. The display glass decorates the floor, but very little fell inside the case, which suggests it broke from within.

The wax figurine is missing.

He catches the scent of burning hair and whirls on his heel, barely turning in time to dodge the grasping claw that reaches for his throat. The creature that meets his gaze reminds him only vaguely of the carved wax figure. Its tall, too-white form shutters and seems to drip with melting wax. Up close, he can see the intricate, sweeping lines that had covered it before burning away. Apparently they weren’t simply carved, but thin ropes of something, keeping the wax trapped. As he watches, a gossamer piece falls away from the figure’s mouth and lights anew.

Its fist retracts, sinking back into the dripping pillar of its liquid form. Kurogane brandishes the stapler like it has any chance at all of protecting him and steps backward, eyes narrowed as he waits to see what the damn thing will do. His heart pounds, too loud in his ears and the distant sound of drumming looms ever nearer.

“Hello little watcher,” it speaks, another impossibly thin cord falling and burning from its chest. “Be a good boy and sit still, won’t you?”

He doesn’t have enough time to be surprised that it can fucking _talk_. It rushes him and he barely ducks the blow, noting the peculiarity of its movement. Wax drips and follows the creature’s motion, bubbling where it touches the ground. He can feel the heat wafting off its deformed fist as it rushes through the air beside his ear.

Whatever. This is fine, he tells himself. He’s seen monsters in storage before. Kurogane firms his stance, waiting for an opening and watching the grotesque way the thing shivers and shifts and reforms. It plays at the illusion of a humanoid, but the way its limbs stretch and grow as they move could never look normal.

“How interesting,” it sighs, and another of those small cords snaps free. There aren’t many left, and as Kurogane watches the thing seems to take a more and more human appearance. “You’re a little different than those colleagues of yours, aren’t you? You’ve got the look of blood about you.”

“Shut up,” he finds himself growling, anger lighting like a flashfire in his veins. This asshole doesn’t know a fucking thing about him. (Except that it does—and perhaps that makes him angrier still.) Kurogane shifts, swings at the thing’s face with his makeshift weapon, but the creature of wax expects the motion. It laughs as it bends impossibly far to avoid his reach.

“My turn!” It chimes, and surges unnaturally forward. It’s fucking _fast_ and Kurogane barely sweeps himself aside in time to dodge. He lets the move carry him behind it with a few extra steps, tries another wide, heavy swing at it with his stapler, but the creature bends away just like before.

He doesn’t know how long he spends trapped in a fruitless game of keep-away with the thing. Thoughts retreat as Kurogane falls into the rhythm of the fight. Just being this close to it is enough to scald, air around it already painfully hot. A single landed hit means a serious burn, Kurogane knows, and he’s sure the thing would take advantage of any moment of weakness. Still, despite the sweat that starts to drip into his eyes and blurr his vision, despite the certainty of death, he dodges the creature’s grasping blows. Fear retreats entirely, buried beneath something he doesn’t want to name.

The thing looses another strangely arced blow and Kurogane finally sees his chance. He takes it, swinging the stapler into the creature’s head hard enough to split it in half, literally knocking the surprised expression off its condescending face and spraying a nearby display with wax. Instantly, the heat of its body transfers to the metal of the stapler and Kurogane has to drop his weapon. He can feel a burn forming on his palm, nerves screaming their distress. (He can barely feel it—there’s something in the way. It’s not over. It’s not—)

For just a second, he thinks it worked. The wax body trembles, sinking into itself and toward the ground, its form slowly losing shape. But Kurogane’s instincts still scream danger, and he doesn’t dare look away.

Sure enough, its sinking soon slows. Beneath Kurogane’s scrutiny, it reforms—laughing mouth first. Any wax knocked off in their fight shivers and inches back toward the central mass, a tiny army of marching paraffin droplets littering the floor like a swarm of maggots. Kurogane eyes the stapler, but even a simple glance reveals the metal is still far too hot to touch. He squares his jaw and watches the creature reform instead, undeterred by its survival.

Alright, so it lived one deathblow. So what? He wonders how many times it can pull itself back together before it begins to lose the ability. How far does he have to spread the pieces? It could kill him for certain, but, he thinks, he can kill it first. (The echo of a song catches in his ear, a distant refrain he knows too well.)

The creature’s laughter halts, the mockery of eyes re-settled in its false skull. Its body distorts as it surges up toward the ceiling in a solid column of boiling wax. Kurogane doesn’t budge and its head tilts, inquisitive.

“You’re an odd one. People usually run by now,” it pouts. It looks less and less human even as its features solidify and reshape, lines of whatever bound it almost completely burned away. “Ah well! More fuel for the Flame,” it sighs and collapses forward.

Kurogane sinks into his instincts, throwing himself behind a nearby display just in time to avoid getting caught in the wave of white. His muscles protest the motion, core over-taxed by the poorly executed leap. The sickly slosh of liquid resounds strangely, accompanied by the clatter of damaged cabinets and the hiss of heated air trapped too fast.

“Come out, come out, little guard dog,” the thing lends its voice to the Song, and Kurogane can _hear_ it now—the music of pain and suffering and the glory of a fight.

In every dream, every nightmare of this moment, he’d always woken to the sound of violence haplessly. He’d never had a choice. He knows he has one now, in the creature flooding beneath the cabinets by his feet and reforming too quickly in front of his face. He can die, or he can _Listen_. Not a fair choice maybe, but one he’s still free to make.

He’s never been the sort to know when to quit.

Kurogane takes a deep breath and stops pretending to ignore the melody that haunts him. He needs a weapon, but he has so many in this room if he would only listen to them. He catches a sharp note in the air and darts just a few meters down the stretch of hall, picking up the jagged glass he’d kicked away not minutes ago. It chimes merrily in his hand, careless of the way it cuts into his fingers.

“Really now,” The creature laughs at him, and the sound weaves itself into the Music. Blood thrums in his veins and the sound of pipes cuts louder than the burning of his self-inflicted wounds or the fear that dwindles ever more distant in the recesses of his mind. The Song of battle calls, and he owes it a fucking dance.

Duck, slide, slash, swipe—Kurogane can feel the difference in his own movements, the lack of control. He doesn’t fucking care (he does.) The creature laughs and its sound drives the Song higher. The air is nearly boiling, wax slinging and singing but Kurogane can scarcely feel it. He knows this—knows the anger in his chest and the melody of red that thrums through his very bones. Things like this creature weren’t made to die, but Kurogane knows _he can kill it anyway._

The glass shard does more damage to Kurogane’s hand than the wax beast, but that too plays into the Song. (Don’t think about the way blood feels between his fingers—don’t think—) Cut and swing and rend and do not give the enemy a single instant of breath. (The sensation of falling and the way thin air pulls the breath from his chest. A way to wake up. A way out of the nightmare—)

Kurogane’s shard makes contact with the soft wax of an over extended paraffin limb, and lops it free. The boiling wax burns so hot that once again he has to drop his makeshift weapon soon after, his palm a blistered, bloody mess—the white starburst of the same, old scar completely buried beneath new wounds. (He can worry about that if he has any of his own mind left after he lives. If he lives)

“Cute,” the creature taunts. Like before, it sinks a little and starts to reform, calling pieces of itself back from afar...

The severed limb doesn’t budge.

The look of fear finally breaks on that strange, waxy expression and Kurogane _grins_.

“Oh—you, are just— _you_ are—” it stammers. The stump of its arm shivers and it shifts, making itself a little shorter to replace the limb instead. That’s fine. Kurogane can whittle it down as many times as he has to. He stays low and keeps his head empty to hear the urging of the Song. “You’re _dead_.”

The smell of kerosene hits the air, and the Song rises to a crescendo as the creature begins to burn with an impossible white light. The air between them simmers, distorting his vision and Kurogane falls back. The flame _will_ gutter—he simply needs a better way to snuff it out.

The creature of wax sings like a star as it surges forward, barreling into a tempered case near S and warping the glass with heat. Kurogane throws himself across the aisle to avoid its charging path, heedless of all but the rhythm in his skull. He hits glass too, feels it cut deep into his shoulder as he shatters a case with the full force of his weight. More knives for cutting, he thinks with an unfamiliar glee, but something else too. Something that rings even sweeter.

The sting of a slow, acid burn spreads immediately over his skin from the instant he grips the umbrella’s handle, and Kurogane’s wild grin widens.

“ _Say your prayers, little Soldier_ ,” the creature hisses, its voice a warped facsimile of human speech as it gives up the semblance of stable form. It spirals toward him in a twisting wave. Its body stretches wide, clearly intending to trap and boil him. He doesn’t bother trying to dodge. The pipes call, and the song is a symphony of pain and instinct and the ragged ends of acid-eaten nerves. He wants to kill this damn thing more than he wants to live, but the song tells him he can have both. The creature hurtles itself at his face, and Kurogane holds the acid-rain umbrella in his ruined grip and _swings_.

Paraffin, you see, is a remarkably unreactive little substance. It even holds up to chemicals like sulfuric and nitric acid, both chemicals prevalent in acid rain. However, when _heated_ , those acids begin to have an effect, and the paraffin breaks down.

The white-wax creature is very, very hot. And the umbrella corrodes like only an artifact can. And deep in the thrall of the Song, Kurogane was _made_ to kill the unkillable.

It’s almost disappointing, he thinks as he watches the creature writhe and scream its death throws, caught in a slow dissolution. (The pipes continue, a high drone, and he’d like it to stop now.) He lets the heat-ruined corpse of the umbrella fall, no longer deaf to the low drum roll of its protest in the Song. His right hand is a mess of blisters and cuts, every inch of him stinging with the burn of acid but he can’t remember how to care. (Is he healing already? It hurts, but not as much as it should—he shouldn’t even be able to move his fingers. That acid _is still dissolving the thing on the floor_. Something’s not right—he should be—)

He hears the song pick back up again with the thread of a new voice just as the last of the wax crumbles to muddy, voiceless nothing. Kurogane looks up, already scanning his environment for the next weapon.

“Alright, whatever you are. I don’t know what you’re doing down here, but you set off enough fucking alarms to—Kurogane?” Shougo steps into view, clutching a fire extinguisher of all things. He could almost laugh at the sight if he weren’t spending every iota of his willpower fighting against the urge to sweep forward and slam his co-worker’s face into the jagged glass of the broken umbrella case.

“Holy shit! What the fuck happened?! Are you okay? I mean. Obviously not—should I call an ambulance?”

The Song urges violence, a persistent beat, a droning wail. It would be so easy to bow to, to keep the dance going, but he—doesn’t need to? (He doesn’t need to. The creature of wax is dead and he is alive and he needs—) The longer he denies the Piper’s tune, the more he begins to feel the abuse his body has taken. He winces, narrowly avoids leaning against the shattered glass edges as his ability to feel pain flickers in and out.

“Kurogane? Shit!” Shougo jerks forward to try to steady him. His grey eyes widen as he catches sight of the destruction the wax figure has waged over most of the Southern wing of Storage... and the broken umbrella at Kurogane’s side. “Is that…?”

“Don’t come near me,” Kurogane bites, still teetering on the brink of murder. His coworker must hear the edge of animal aggression in his voice because the man freezes in place.

“Okay, but what happened?” The poor man sounds terribly confused and not a little intimidated.

“‘What happened’? I’ve been fucking warning you all fucking week that something was going to—” he doesn’t have anywhere near the patience necessary to explain. Rage simmers in his blood and screams over his every thought, banking the pipes louder. He can’t do this right now. He has to leave. He has to force the Song back down.

He doesn’t hate Shougo, not like he hated that _thing_ , but the Song doesn’t care. It demands more—sets his ears ringing with fucking _noise_.

No. He’s not doing this.

His burned hand erupts with protest, music discordant but still not fading. It pulses through his head, trampling all sense. His fists clench, wounds splitting and he shudders at the feel of blood. “Don’t touch anything,” he hisses, flinging as much of the liquid away from himself as he can to try to banish the flashbacks before they set in. He’s got to get to the café and Fai and the distance of that other realm. He needs—“I’m getting a fucking coffee.”

“Uh, no offense, but I think maybe you need A&E. Can I call—?”

Kurogane pins the man with such a fury that he loses his words. He waits for the room to stop spinning, breathes deep, and starts walking, heedless of the way his body aches. The pipes echo and his heart beats a steady accompaniment. He’s going to find Fai, and he’s going to quiet the fucking song. And anyone who wants to stop him on the way is _welcome to try._

* * *

His heartbeat pulses with a drum’s timbre and Kurogane’s thoughts skip to the beat as he marches himself the short distance from the Institute to the Cat’s Eye. His wounds protest, acid burns mostly abated save for the unseen skin of his back, gash at his arm and several fresh pink wax burns too-quickly healed. His right hand _screams_ to the tune of the Song. He grits his teeth and blocks it out along with the noise, but he cannot block the way it trails blood from the stares of passersby.

Kurogane tries anything and everything he can think of. He breathes out of time with the beat, does his best to hold on to the thought of Fai and the promise of blessed falling. But once summoned and accepted, the Song seeks him out. He can’t _stop hearing_ it now, and he knows with a frightening certainty that even if he gouged out his own eardrums, he would hear it still.

The short blocks to the café stretch so much further than usual. He stops to cross the road and catches an echo of honking from the street that quickly weaves itself into the music of anger. Each note sings rage in his skull and drives his terror to the fore. So many people line the streets and he doesn’t _want_ to become the senseless creature in his dreams—

(But it would be so easy—isn’t he angry? Isn’t he tired of being alone? The world just takes and takes and no one cares. Why should he? Doesn’t he _like_ the color red?)

By the time he makes it to the café the song has reached a crescendo in his veins and he barely remembers enough of himself to recognize the face behind the counter. He needs blue eyes and falling and he doesn’t…

“Oh! Well, hello Kuro-grumpy.” Were there other people in the storefront? He can’t remember in retrospect. There must have been. The Cat’s Eye Café is never completely empty, not even so late in the day. He doesn’t remember seeing them. His vision tunnels on blonde and blue instead.

(There are forks by the door, and he can reach the spoon by the espresso machine without issue—just pry those blue eyes free and never think again of the Titan’s creature), the pipes sing and his own thoughts with them. Kurogane keeps his jaw clenched and spends all of himself to refuse.

“Sorry, my friend needs help. Do you mind to watch the counter?” He watches Fai go through all the motions necessary to explain away Kurogane’s strange behavior and pull a fellow worker to watch his place at the register. Every second he denies the song is another spent in agony, head pounding and raw skin protesting. His right fist, clenched tightly closed, has not stopped bleeding.

“We’ll be out back,” Fai calls out, and pulls Kurogane behind him toward a door he’s always ignored before now. He has to bury the urge to deck the man for it, stumbling in Fai’s wake with jerky footsteps. They pass a very standard seeming coat rack—(He could slam the creature’s head against any of the hooks and drill into the skull at the temple—) hung with fresh, Cat’s Eye brand aprons—(canvas apron strings are strong enough not to break around the column of that throat while the target suffocates—) and Kurogane can scarcely _breathe_ without the song blaring through his thoughts.

“What have you gotten yourself into, Kuro-dummy,” Fai sighs, mostly to himself as they leave out the back door to find the back-alley behind it. Kurogane’s steps are strange and jerky where he follows, rage banked by the use of another fucking nickname.

(He wants to make Fai _hurt_ ) He wants to make it stop.

“Hurry,” he manages to bite past the growl building in his throat, not sure what he needs to hurry _toward_. He can hardly hear himself over everything else. (Whatever powers he has, physically, Fai is a slip of a man and there are enough sharp edges and corners and hard surfaces in this alley to end him several times over. Kurogane could do it—would the Titan’s creature still bleed red?)

The blonde regards him with something like worry. He hesitates for just a second at the look on Kurogane’s face—rage twisted by panic.

“Don’t kill me for this, okay?” Too thin fingers rest gently against the skin of Kurogane’s jaw and his gaze finds Fai’s. His breath stutters in his chest, caught by Deep Blue.

(Gouge them out! Stop him—don’t let him—) Kurogane bites his cheek until it bleeds and leans into Fai’s touch, eyes pinned to Fai’s like a lifeline. “You’re so going to owe me,” Fai huffs as blue finally, _finally_ flashes bright. The alley warps and slides and falls to the tune of the Song _screaming—_

“This had better work,” He hears Fai murmur, watches the words fall from his lips but he can’t—can’t—

The rushing wind of the High Place drives the frantic spiral of the pipes away in seconds, and all the strength that rage leant him with it. Every muscle screeches protest at the way he’d pushed himself to move, every burn and half-healed cut and inch of acid-irritated skin and he… could not be more relieved to feel the full brunt of it. Kurogane shutters, legs buckling as he exhales.

“Whoa, whoa! Easy does it.” Fai’s touch shifts from his face to his shoulders and deceptively strong arms reach out to brace him. Fai guides them both down to sit carefully instead of pitching sideways. They balance, legs swinging off the roof ledge of a staggeringly high tower block that he doesn’t believe ever existed. Kurogane looks straight down at the ground impossibly far below and cannot force himself to feel a thing. “Don’t fall on me now, Mr. Black.”

“You sure? Might be for the best,” he tries to joke, but his shaking voice lends the words too much honesty. He can finally _think_ now. He feels like he hasn’t been in control of his own mind since before he heard the glass break in storage.

“Nah, you’re not afraid enough of it, it’d be a waste” Fai’s cryptic words wash over him, those damn eyes raking over his sorry state, pretty face furrowed with worry.

“Whatever the fuck _that_ means.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll understand eventually.” The blonde laughs, but the sound is strained. He’s focused, still running through his inventory of Kurogane’s person.

“Asshole.” The insult escapes him, but his voice is too fond for Fai to take offense. He feels half-delirious—exhausted and everything hurts, and he just—he knows he shouldn’t trust Fai this much. Fai is a creature just as that wax thing was (just like Kurogane is?) But Fai pulled him away from the precipice of madness and looks at him like he gives a shit and damn it all, Kurogane can’t help it.

“Sounds like you’re back. Dare I even ask—” One of Fai’s searching hands presses just a little too hard against the still-healing gash of Kurogane’s upper arm, mostly hidden by his shirt sleeve. Fai gapes at the red painting his skin with alarm, but Kurogane finds himself unable to stomach the sight. He turns away and focuses on the ever more distant ground instead. “What did you _do_?” the blonde chokes, not a little horrified and tugging at the torn edges of Kurogane’s shirt to see the wound better.

“Snuffed out a candle,” he deadpans. He can play cryptic too, and Fai’s huff of annoyance warms his heart. Fai prods at the wound at his shoulder, and moves on, fingers tugging Kurogane’s hand away from his side. Kurogane’s gaze wanders. He feels nauseous as he watches Fai pry his clenched fist open, and not just because the motion hurts. The burns and the torn flesh are… well. He’s certain if the song hadn’t… _done something_ to him he wouldn’t be able to move his fingers any longer, but they don’t turn his stomach at the sight. He just can’t stand to see his hands coated in red.

Fai interrupts his spiraling thoughts, pinning him in place with furious worry. “A candle. _Seriously_.”

“…Trouble at work,” Kurogane amends before realizing, somewhat hysterically, that Fai still doesn’t even know where he works. “I…there was something that wanted me to burn, I guess.”

It shouldn’t be so easy to relax here. He’s dangling countless stories above the hard non-earth with little to nothing to keep his balance on the edge of a sharply pitched roof alongside the being that rules this hellscape, and he still…

“That doesn’t explain the way the War had its hooks in you,” Fai presses, cradling Kurogane’s injuries so gently that it almost hurts worse. “Christ, are these _chemical burns?_ ”

“The war? Is that the thing that sounds like music?” His interest piques, pulls him back into the present. Fai shoots him a strange, cryptic glance from behind his bangs, still leaning forward over Kurogane’s palm. 

“I… guess so. It’s something that drives people to violence. I think maybe I’ve seen it move through music before.”

“Hmm.” That sounds about right. He doesn’t know how to feel—He’d known in some way since he’d met Fai that there were things deeper than the artifacts in Storage. He’d thought… He doesn’t know what he thought when the dreams first started, but he certainly never would have pinned them on a shapeless entity like, ‘The War.’ It’s a strange relief to realize the Song isn’t just a figment of his own insanity, but at the same time… where did he fuck up? How did he wind up—what… possessed?

“How do I stop it?”

The look Fai pins him with sets him ill at ease—too sympathetic. Fai has never passed up an opportunity to tease him before but in this he seems all serious glances and worried frowns.

“Your ‘worse than falling’—the dreams you used this place to escape… are they about the W—music?” The Song and his memories and the ocean of blood all flicker in his thoughts, but in the High Place they cannot reach him. Hell. The dreams. Are they going to get _worse_ now?

“Some of them.”

“Then… you don’t.”

That’s…

Maybe some part of him already knew, but Kurogane stiffens all the same. He tears his ruined hand away from Fai’s examination to hide it at his side, staring _hard_ at the long fall beneath his feet. It goes against everything in him to believe he can’t fight back in _any_ arena. (Perhaps that is part of the problem?)

“If you’re messing with me…“ He grits the words, newly wary of the promise of violence in his own tone. He has to second guess it now—how much of his anger is his own?

“I wouldn’t. Not about this. I…It’s… you’re becoming something. A part of it. You can’t stop that. Just… maybe slow it down.” He can hear the words Fai doesn’t say—the familiarity that lends weight to his rambling. He knows, suddenly and without a doubt that at some point Fai had _become_ his own creature too. He doesn’t have the energy to think about that fact.

“ _How_.”

“I don’t know! I don’t know the War well. I guess—try not to get angry? Avoid fights? You have to stop feeding it…” Fai opens his mouth to say more, but his voice fails him. He huffs instead, bloodied fingers reaching up to comb nervously through his barely-contained hair. Kurogane reaches out and nearly unbalances himself to stop the motion, less damaged left hand wrapped around Fai’s wrist. Fai blinks at him, surprised.

“…there’s blood,” He reminds the man, unable to describe just how desperately he wants to avoid seeing it paint Fai’s face.

“There is,” he agrees. The look in his eyes is…. They’re very pretty here, Kurogane thinks unbidden, a little more normal, untouched by the strange glinting promise of a falling death, but still so damn blue. “There _is_ ,” Fai repeats, and the fragile regard behind his gaze retreats behind the steel of his usual masks. The landscape shifts, roof ledge suddenly joined to the maze of scaffolding Kurogane saw once before. “Come on. We’re going to hospital.”

The sheer whiplash of the switch dulls Kurogane’s protest. He doesn’t let go of Fai’s wrist, just lets his grip fall to the man’s hand instead and goes where he’s led. Fai pulls him to his feet and marches him across a teetering plank before he thinks to squawk,

“To tell them _what_ , exactly?”

“Workplace accident,” Fai shoots back without pause, stepping them both up onto a window ledge just before the board tumbles to the ground behind them. Kurogane barely notices its fall, something inside him too numb to feel panic.

“I work in what basically amounts to a museum. I don’t think—” He nearly stumbles into Fai’s back as the man’s head whips around to stare.

“…you work in the Magnus Institute?”

“Yes..?” Fai’s grip clenches over his own, making the burns sting and he’s suddenly suspicious. “How did you know?” There are several museums-like organizations in Chelsea, so the fact that Fai jumped to the Magnus Institute so quickly is… He hasn’t figured out what that means yet.

For just a moment, Fai looks absolutely furious, but the emotion doesn’t seem aimed at him. Kurogane doesn’t know how he can tell, but he has a feeling that might just be something he can _do_ now.

“Well… Just tell them that. I have a feeling they won’t ask any other questions.” Something strange solidifies in Fai’s bearing and he pins his gaze forward as they trek on—a teetering walk over the window ledges, a brief climb up a creaking fire escape that has his hand pulsing with agony every time he accidentally touches the railing.

“…” Kurogane stares at the back of Fai’s skull, doubts and confusion too jumbled in his head to escape his throat. Fai recognizes them anyway.

“Just _walk_.” He sighs, and Kurogane focuses on trying not to fall.

* * *

Fai kicks him out of the High Place onto the Hospital’s rooftop access before he can think better of his decisions and throw himself into the abyss. Stumbling into the mundane London air, Kurogane waits on the roof with baited breath for the music to resume. …He hears blessed nothing save the usual sounds of the city far below. The threat of a rhythm looms like a shark at the back of his mind, but his ears are blessedly free of any piping notes, and when Kurogane passes an intern in the hall, he has no desire to drive the guy’s pen into the soft tissue under his jaw. (Or at least, not more than usual.)

He has to make his way to the check in desk from the top of the building without a visitor pass, but somehow he manages not to tip off any of the security team or the busy staff. His disheveled state draws stares from the patients capable of looking, but he makes it all the way down to A&E without someone screaming so… maybe there’s something to the old adage that you can go anywhere if you look like you belong.

When he flashes his hand, the hospital staff look properly alarmed and he finds himself rushed into an exam room. But sure enough, the doctor they bring in to take a look doesn’t say a word after he mentions the Magnus Institute. Kurogane swallows his rampant suspicion and tries not to picture Fai’s smug grin in the back of his thoughts.

They cut his shirt off to get to the gash on his arm and shoulder, ever over-cautious, and that’s when the doctor notices the deeper burns that map his back. She doesn’t say anything at all but he can _feel_ her disapproval.

“It’s a dangerous job.” He murmurs as a joke, mentally screaming when the doctor only pinches her mouth in a tight line and _nods_.

He’s _still_ trying to figure that one out.

Sixteen stiches in his arm, enough bandages and antibiotic ointment to make him feel like a fucking embalmed corpse, and too many dark, looping lengths of thread in the skin of his palm to count before they decide he’s good enough to release. They had to put him on good painkiller for all the laceration work, so the nurse who comes to discharge him asks him who he can call to help get home. In his drug induced haze, he can only think of Fai. He mentions he has a barista at a café he likes. The staff wisely chooses to keep him until the drugs wear off.

So that’s why he finds himself falling out of the night bus in a hospital-provided smock and trudging back into his flat at nearly half-three in the morning. He lets the door slam when he steps through it without the energy to spare to think of his neighbors, aftereffects of morphine making his head ache and his mouth taste like cotton.

Kurogane leans a little too hard against the wall as he turns the lock and simply sighs at the state of his empty apartment. Nothing strange, everything just as he left it this morning in a frantic jumble to make it to the café. He has a pair of shoes scattered half-way to the kitchen and an unused raincoat sprawled over the couch near the door, but there are no strange smells or haunting refrains in the air. (He wonders how long that will remain true)

He pulls at the hospital gown’s ties with his left hand, eager to be free of the thing. His right sits all but useless, wrapped in gauze at his side. Typing up the incident report tomorrow morning is going to be absolute hell, and _fuck_ , he has to leave for work in three hours if he wants to get there on time. One tie yanks loose, then the other. Kurogane shucks the smock and leaves it abandoned right at the door. He’ll worry about that later. Not like he has a roommate to give a shit.

The thought of food plagues him, but he doesn’t have enough energy to scrounge for something edible in the fridge. It’s too damn late. He’ll figure out something on the way to work. He stumbles across the tiny space between his front door and his bedroom and doesn’t even bother to flip the lights on as he drags himself to bed. He’s just about to flop onto the mattress when he catches the glint of moonlight on metal in the corner of his eye.

The knife.

“…” Kurogane regards it, turning the day over in his head. He’d left it behind because the dreams had been getting worse and he thought… he doesn’t know what. That somehow it might help to avoid carrying it? Like that might make the echo of Music quiet, but obviously that hadn’t been the case. All he’d managed to do was drive himself into a corner. If he’d had the knife, maybe he could have whittled the creature down without resorting to the Song.

More things will find their way into Storage, more creatures will break free. He’ll have to fight for his life from time to time for as long as he works there. Is he really going to continue to hobble himself by avoiding the knife? What’s the point? If he’s going to inevitably lose his mind to it anyway, why deny himself the tool? Maybe… if he can try to keep fights to a minimum and end them as quickly as possible when they happen, he can stave this thing off?

He still hasn’t really dealt with the idea that he has no escape from… _becoming_. Fai said he didn’t have a chance to escape it, but that doesn’t feel real. He knows what giving in to the Song feels like now. He remembers… for just one moment, he had a choice. He just can’t afford to make the same one, right? He can do that. If his choices ever narrow down to murder or death again, he’ll choose death. He can do that. But at least if he keeps the knife around he might have more of a fighting chance.

Kurogane sighs deeply and wanders the short steps to the wall. He grips the hilt, forces himself to ignore the lingering echo of music that threatens his ears, and pulls free. The blade slides suspiciously easily. The room is dark save for the light of the street lamps through the window, but even in the dim Kurogane can see the sharp sheen of the blade. He had thrown it carelessly into drywall and maybe a wall stud, he should need to sharpen it at the very minimum, but the edge is as perfect as the day he’d brought the knife home.

New suspicion blossoms in Kurogane’s head as he hunts for the thing’s sheath, eventually finding it among the mess of his floor. It’s… probably fine. He probably just got lucky. (He knows that cannot possibly be true.) He doesn’t _care_ right now because he is about to collapse.

Kurogane tosses the knife on to his nightstand and flops onto the bed, uncaring of the way the burns protest beneath their bandages. Maybe he’ll have enough energy to panic properly in the morning.


	5. The Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fai makes it so easy to lose his grip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drinking in this chapter, but it's pretty tame.

* * *

“So, do you remember how you owe me?” Fai grins at him, lounging against the exterior wall of the Magnus Institute as if he belongs there when Kurogane steps out for the night. Somehow he manages not to startle badly enough to draw the knife, but it’s a near thing. He turns to face his visitor slowly, catching sight of pale blonde and too thin and Fai’s best attempt at charming. He’s never seen Fai out of work clothes before, but there he stands in a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, top two buttons undone to flash his prominent collarbone. He is, as usual, unfortunately attractive

“No.” He probably should have seen this coming when Fai figured out his workplace not a week ago, but somehow he’d naively thought Fai’s obvious dislike of the Institute might keep him away.

Kurogane starts walking, already wary and not sure exactly where Fai intends to push him. He tries not to pay attention as the barista sighs, letting the motion pull him forward and away from the wall. His hair, half up in the back, falls forward to shutter his face as he falls in step at Kurogane’s side.

“Come _on_ ,” he whines, “You _totally_ owe me. I don’t just yank people out of the clutches of eldritch forces beyond our knowing for my health, Kuro-stingy.”

“Not my problem,” he’s too tired for this. His hand is still a mess of bandages and nearly-healed stitches. He can bear it, but the ache exhausts him as the day drags on. Besides, he doesn’t want to think about Fai calling in debts like a fae legend. He doesn’t want to think that the closest thing he has to a relationship right now may have been built on some kind of trap of obligation, or that Fai could take the promise of Falling away just when he’s realized he needs it most.

Fai reaches out and grabs at Kurogane’s good shoulder. They both jerk to a halt at the corner just before the crossing. A few fellow pedestrians shoot them baleful glares for the inconvenience of blocking the sidewalk. He’s not going to let this go, Kurogane realizes, a sinking feeling in his chest. The restless itch of anticipation thrums beneath his skin, mind whispering of betrayals and the call of the Song.

“Alright, what do I owe you,” he grits, resolutely tamping down the paranoia. Fai wouldn’t wait this long to spring a trap if he had one. It’s going to be fine. It’ll be—

“One date.”—fine? Kurogane blinks at his almost-friend.

“A date,” he repeats numbly. He has no idea how to deal with his own feelings on the subject, so he turns to indignation instead. “You couldn’t have just _asked,_ like a normal person?”

Fai laughs, something real and honest that makes him difficult to look at. Another midsummer sunset paints the sky orange red, but Fai’s presence keeps him from thinking too deeply on memories of another evening. That, and the way the light plays over the bared column of Fai’s neck, and—

Fai’s hair shifts in just the right way and he catches sight of something darker than the shadows there. Kurogane focuses on the sight, uncertain at first, but the longer he looks…

“Is that a bruise?” In an instant, Fai’s good humor fades. His form twitches, but he stops himself from reaching up to cover the slowly fading marks from view. They don’t look like love bites, so Kurogane doesn’t find himself plagued by jealousy. No, they look like… handprints. Like someone tried to strangle him. A tiny dusting of bruises even follows the trail up to Fai’s jaw. Kurogane has to stop himself from reaching out to follow the path with his fingertips, indignant rage at an unknown assailant building beneath his thoughts. “Who the hell…?”

“It’s nothing important, really. I just bit off a little more than I could chew,” Fai waves his concern away with a grin just a few shades too brittle. It’s definitely important, Kurogane knows. “Come on, just one date. I’ll have you home before too late, Kuro-ella I promise.”

This whole thing still sets alarms ringing in Kurogane’s head. It’s _Wednesday_. He has work tomorrow. Fai’s caginess about the bruises makes him worry, and that really is one of the worst nicknames Fai has ever come up with, and his lingering wounds still ache badly enough to drive him to exhaustion, but—

“Got a place in mind?”

* * *

It’s strange how that single word messes with Kurogane’s perceptions: “date.” By all accounts he’s met Fai at least a dozen other times in situations that would very easily earn the label if he’d ever tried to name them, but… he hadn’t. They’d shared food across a table. They’d taken an impromptu walk in a city park he still doesn’t rightly know the name of. They’d chatted over coffee and traded barbs in a strange other-dimensional hellscape and yet, somehow…none of that had ever seemed to carry quite the same weight.

Even the way Fai’s fingers fit over his feels different, despite his barely week-old memories of Fai leading him by hand through the impossible scaffolding across London. Fai’s silhouette a few feet ahead casts the same shape as before, but no supernatural air haunts the London air around them—only the usual sights and sounds of the city on the edge of night. Fai tugs and he follows, heat high in his cheeks for more reasons than the late summer temperature.

Kurogane thinks about hearts drawn on coffee cups and desperate searching for blue eyes and the taste of mango sorbet and adds the warmth of Fai’s touch to the dangerous shrine of sentiment he’s built to this ridiculous man in his head. 

Of _course_ Fai doesn’t tell him where they’re headed, but somehow Kurogane doesn’t mind that as much as he usually would. He has trusted the barista with far larger things already, and Fai could have dropped him from a Fall many times before today if he ever wished Kurogane truly ill.

They don’t step into a strange, teetering landscape this time, though Kurogane half-expects the transition at any second. They simply board the District line in Sloane Square and make a transfer to Piccadilly. Fai doesn’t let his hand go, not even as they sit pressed together by the crowd in the back of the train car. He chatters about absolutely inane topics like the changing coffee prices at Cat’s Eye or local news or Tube architecture, plying sarcastic quips from Kurogane’s usually tightly clenched mouth, fingers of his free hand tracing delicately over the healed burn scars that dot Kurogane’s left as they talk and it’s…

He doesn’t know what it is. But every time Fai laughs the sound does strange things to Kurogane’s heart And every time he catches a new glimpse of the bruises on Fai’s neck the coil of rage piling in his soul loops a little higher.

He wants _so badly_ to trust this date with everything he has, but the marks on Fai’s skin taunt him like storm clouds on the horizon, heralds of the sad looks Fai only chances in his direction when he thinks Kurogane can’t see. He’s afraid to ask and shatter the illusion, so he doesn’t. Just holds tighter and wonders whether he can keep from letting go.

“You know,” he starts to press as they step off the Tube at Piccadilly Circus, buzz of a very active Soho crowd echoing all around them. “I can’t exactly afford most of the places out here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I asked you out, so it’s obviously my treat.”

“Obviously,” Kurogane shoots back with a raised eyebrow. As far as he knows, Fai is a barista who works for barely minimum wage. A barista in Chelsea, sure, but…

Then again, he’s also some sort of eldritch creature who can toss people into a dimension of eternal falling. Maybe that lands him some kind of supplementary pay?

Fai lets their path wind over sidewalks, through gentrified alleys, past strange fusion restaurants and upscale bars. Night wraps the world in a soft blanket dotted by the glow of street-lamps by the time they grace the front step of a white-washed building advertising “Traditional Russian cuisine, Soho Style,” in colorful, blocky letters. Painted arrows point to the shisha bar nestled behind a basement door.

Kurogane glances skeptically from the front entrance back to Fai, but the blond only tuts and bustles him through the door before he can second guess anything.

“Oh, shut up, it’s good food and not too terribly busy. Next time, _you_ can—” Fai’s tongue stumbles over the sentence. His mouth pulls just for a moment into an unreadable frown before his expression reboots, smile resurrected so quickly that Kurogane could almost have missed it. He hadn’t. The fear blaring at the edges of his thoughts pulses that much louder. “I’m paying, so I get to pick.” 

“I didn’t actually say anything.” Kurogane plays along when he would rather push back. He thinks he knows the meaning behind the gap in what Fai voices and fails to say: _there won’t be a next time._ He doesn’t know what that means if it’s true—why Fai wants to bother with any of this. (Why Kurogane cares so much for the answer.) He can’t find a way to ask. He holds Fai’s hand tighter instead. With a sideways glance, Fai squeezes back, just once, and lets go.

“Yes, but you’re very loud. Even without words.”

“And _you_ keep burying the things you really mean beneath them.” Kurogane can’t help himself from snapping. The lost contact feels like a far deeper statement, and he doesn’t know yet how to answer it. Fai winces, too-blue eyes flitting up to Kurogane’s face.

“Look, just for a little while, could you—”

“Table for two, gentlemen?” The young man at the Host’s station calls, and Fai’s expression flips faster than Kurogane can blink. He tries to pay attention to the back and forth, but he can’t focus past the knot of foreboding building in his gut.

The host leads them to sit in a tiny table tucked away from the rest of the well-attended restaurant, blocked off by a thin partition. Somehow, Kurogane manages to settle in the bench without busting the stitches in his palm or lighting his back up with pain, but it’s a near thing. He keeps his gaze pinned to Fai, mind racing. Bruises paint Fai’s skin, and he came out of nowhere to pursue this “date” idea, and something connects the two, Kurogane _knows_ it does. He just can’t figure out what.

“Any idea what you want to order, Kuro-glaring?” Fai sing songs, holding his menu up like a screen to shade his face from view.

 _“Just for a little while,”_ He’d said. Just for a little while, do what? Pretend that things are normal? Forget they’re both toing the line of what it means to be human? Ignore the fact that Fai holds himself like a fugitive waiting to run?

Kurogane exhales, long and slow—tries to cast himself back to an earlier time. Before he understood anything about artifacts, or Falling, or the Song that lingers always now at the edge of his thoughts. Before the paranoia that sours his every interaction.

Fai’s hand is still warm when he finds it again across the table. Blue peers up at him over the edge of the menu, gaze filled with questions Kurogane still doesn’t know how to answer. Instead, he says only,

“I know literally nothing about Russian food.”

“Oh! Well in _that_ case…I’ll just order for you, shall I?” The smile Fai graces him with is worth the struggle. Kurogane clings to it like a lifeline, tries to keep every detail as a memory he can pick back up when this reaches its inevitable end. The soft, orange light of the restaurant bathes Fai in the same hues as a sunrise, only his strange blue eyes unchanged by the glow. “How does Pelmeni Sibirskiye sound?”

“It sounds like something I’ve never heard of before in my life,” Kurogane retorts. It’s easier to fall back into than he thought, this rhythm with Fai.

The blond hums, mouth quirked mischievously at the corners—the sort of look that fills Kurogane with an entirely different sort of dread. “…It has milk in it doesn’t it.”

“Oh don’t be silly,” Fai coos. “Just sour cream on the side.” Kurogane ignores the complaints of his injuries to reach over and whap Fai with his own menu, vindicated for the action by the sound of Fai’s laugh.

Yeah, okay. ‘ _Just for a little while,_ ’ huh? He can do that.

* * *

Fai orders for them both and Kurogane continues to find himself utterly bewildered by the foreign cuisine. It’s fine, he guesses? Hearty. Lots of meat and mushrooms, thin dumplings and things that look like pancakes even though Fai assures him they’re different. Fai tries to tell him the names, but Kurogane has trouble keeping track because Fai _also_ ordered ten fucking shots of vodka for the table in lieu of any other kind of drink.

“I _do_ still have work tomorrow,” he remembers protesting as the tray full of shots followed a jug of water onto the table.

“I bet you can drink enough coffee in the morning to make up for it, Mr. Black,” Fai had only teased back, immediately knocking the first shot down with expert form and a challenge in his eye. Asshole. The jerk already understood Kurogane enough to know he couldn’t just let a look like that go, so…

He does his best to pace himself with the heavy food and space the shots with water, but he still feels just a little unsteady as the fourth glass burns its way down his throat.

“Ugh,” Kurogane sets the shot back down in unison with Fai, absolutely not enjoying the self-satisfied smirk that plays its way over the man’s too-attractive face.

“Too much for you?”

“No, it’s _strawberry_ flavored _._ ” He wipes at his mouth with the increasingly messy wrappings over the back of his right hand. Fai laughs, long and loud and true. Maybe the sound tugs at the corners of Kurogane’s expression too. “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Sometime I’m going to introduce you to alcohol that _doesn’t_ taste like cough syrup.”

“Yeah?” the object of his attention stares back, leaning just a little too hard onto his elbow against the table. It’s almost reassuring to see that, eldritch creature or no, Fai gets tipsy just like everyone else. The alcohol or the atmosphere seem to soften the walls he keeps over his real thoughts. Between the sadness that lurks in his eyes and the bruises he keeps forgetting not to touch, he sets off every protective instinct Kurogane ever tried to bury.

“If you let me.” They both know he doesn’t mean the drinks anymore. He’s breaking the rules, admitting to the invisible something that haunts Fai and implies they’ll never get another chance like this. But the shots make him a little braver than usual.

Fai rolls his head just enough to bury his face in the palm that props him up, mutters something to himself that Kurogane can’t quite hear. He knows better than to press. 

“You… just…” Fai starts, stops. He stabs a dumpling viciously with a fork and shovels it into his mouth before he finds his more usual tone. “You know what? Tell me about work.”

“Work?” Kurogane huffs at the abrupt and obvious change of subject. Great. One of the last things he wants to talk about. He eyes the last of the shots, hand twinging. “That’s not going to make it easy to keep avoiding certain topics.”

“You do so well at avoiding them anyway,” Fai teases, piling more food on Kurogane’s plate and adding a more than generous dollop of sour cream to his own. His motions are a little messier than usual and he drips some over the table’s surface, but neither of them has a mind to care right now. “Work is a thing people talk about on dates, right? And you’ve already seen mine.”

“If you’re sure…” Alcohol quiets the suspicion in his veins and something pensive and soft in Fai’s expression muddies his thoughts far worse than the booze. Kurogane breathes deep and searches for the words he never thought he’d have cause to say aloud “Alright, my job. Well first off, I’m pretty sure my department has the highest death rate of any archive on the planet. But I think maybe you already guessed as much.”

“I seem to remember you saying something like, ‘my job will kill me before the year is out.’” Kurogane snorts into his water glass—only just avoids choking.

“You remember that?”

“Of course I do!” Fai pouts, indignant. “It’s not exactly the sort of thing one forgets!”

Fai finishes another bite of his food and uses the distraction to fling a drop of sour cream in Kurogane’s direction.

Even with alcohol in his veins something drives him to hold a drink menu up against the volley like a shield. He _knows_ he shouldn’t have the reflexes for that right now—but he makes the move anyway. The white blob catches on the menu’s shiny surface and slides slowly down. (The song of battle pulses at the horizon of sobriety, just out of reach.)

“Do you want to hear this or not?” He lets the barrier fall, unwilling to keep holding it with even an echo of a threat rattling in his head.

“Sorry. You’re right of course.” Fai seems to read his discomfort. Pale hands reach out to empty the last of the water jug in Kurogane’s dwindling glass. He must have noticed Kurogane has trouble pouring the damn thing for right now. “Terribly deadly position. Do go on.”

“Yeah. Terribly. And only half of that is because of the damn artifacts themselves.” 

He tells Fai everything, or near enough to it. No protocols or security measures, nothing too specific about placement, but everything that matters—all the things he wanted to say to another human being for so _long_ and have them understand—all the words that he’d lost contact with everyone else in his life to keep from speaking aloud. 

And Fai listens. He listens to Kurogane’s account of his very first brush with an artifact, years back now—a strange bottle of dark liquid that had made him feel cold just by touching it, and how it had eaten all the light on the shelf they settled it on. Not a drop spilled, but Kurogane still swears the shadows are deeper in that storage area. Even with a few added containers around the bottle. 

Fai listens to the story about the thing that crawled out of the vase and rendered Kurogane unable to feel safe near pottery for months after. He listens to Kurogane complain about the time no one warned a newbie not to touch the books, and they’d had to ignore the impossible windows that kept appearing everywhere for _weeks_ , not sure what would come through if they looked. Fai listens to his speculation about the _Saturn Devouring his Son_ , and the acid-rain umbrella, and the fucking _wax figurine,_ and every bull-headed idiot move his boss ever made _._

Kurogane always feared the idea of talking to anyone about any of this, as much as he sometimes wished he could. He’d thought, for a long time now, that only other storage workers could ever understand, but Fai… Fai doesn’t seem at all surprised by the strange or sometimes horrifying litany Kurogane graces him with. Just… tired.

By the time Kurogane runs out of things to say, his throat protests his extended conversation, and he and Fai are two of the last customers in the restaurant.

“Bottled dark, man-eating paintings and candle creatures... quite the collection, your Archives,” Fai sighs. He pushes Kurogane’s glass a little closer to his hand and sets his own near-full one beside it for good measure. “Nothing in there like me, I suppose?”

Kurogane considers him over the rim of a glass as he downs the rest of their water. Supposedly, somewhere in area A they have a parachute that, when used, incites the sky to eat the wearer. No ethical way to test whether it works, but still. Similar maybe. Not the same.

“Not quite, but then I don’t think anything quite like you exists.” He doesn’t know why he says it like that. As a joke? To flirt, maybe? He’s never been good at such things, but the look of deep pain that crosses Fai’s expression still comes as a surprise.

“Maybe not anymore.” He watches, curious and not a little worried as Fai grimaces and downs the last of the shots. The only one remaining had been Kurogane’s but he doesn’t begrudge Fai the drink. “Ugh. Fennel. Sorry, I think you’d have liked that one. I’ll have to… You’ll have to try it again some time.”

The reminder of the words Fai refuses to say pulls him further from the strange haze of contentment. Time has flown by. The check was paid at some point amidst his tales, and he thinks perhaps their ‘little while,’ has ended. At the very least, Kurogane has finally reached the end of his patience.

They’ve spent long enough at the table that the alcohol is already fading from his veins but he still has enough liquid courage to reach out and trace the bruises that map Fai’s neck. The man jolts beneath his touch, coltish and frightened of something Kurogane doesn’t understand. He sighs, retreats. 

“Fai… why did you really invite me out here?”

Blue eyes widen, then shutter as Fai collects his thoughts. He stares at a point in the distance Kurogane can’t find, smile slow and sad.

“I guess it is getting late.” With one last wistful glance, he gathers himself and slides out of the booth. He stands there, one arm outstretched to help Kurogane.

“That’s not an answer.”

“No, it’s not.” Fai stays where he is, arm held aloft. “Come on. Just one more stop to make tonight. It’s not far.”

Kurogane doesn’t trust this, but… Whatever else the man intends, he’s the first to listen to Kurogane’s complaints on work without flinching—first person he’s felt comfortable even _trying_ to talk to. And this play pretend at something has felt more real and meaningful than every other minute of his life since… Kurogane doesn’t remember when. So. He doesn’t trust this. Not one bit.

He takes Fai’s hand anyway.

* * *

With a river running straight through its heart, it only seems natural that London has a great many bridges to its name. The Tower Bridge numbers among them, a still functioning drawbridge frequented by cars and pedestrians that straddles the river between the Tower of London and Southwark. When it was originally completed in 1894, Tower Bridge included a high, open air walkway that pedestrians could use to cross even if the bridge were raised to allow boats to pass. Of course, few people had any interest in climbing the many stairs to reach the top when they could simply wait for the bridge to come back down, and the open air walkway was closed to the public not twenty years into the bridge’s existence.

In the early 80’s, the space was converted into part of the Tower Bridge Exhibition—a museum and tourist trap fully enclosed and serviced by a lift. The high pedestrian walkway at the top of a long stair has not existed for nearly four decades. Kurogane doesn’t know the specifics, but he knows that much.

And yet…

“It’s quite the view, isn’t it?” Fai sits on a railing that should no longer exist, wind tugging at his hair and clothes as they both stare out at the London skyline. Logically, Kurogane thinks, the landscape should match the timeline of the bridge. He expects to see a slightly shorter 1980’s London. Instead, he finds the towering silhouette of the Shard and the bulbous shape of City Hall right where he’d left them in the current day. He shouldn’t be able to see the stars either—not with the streetlights blaring and casting glowing reflections over the water far below. But the sky above is an endless map of shining stars in an ink-dark sea that threatens him with vertigo when he looks too long. He thinks if he let himself stare, gravity would reverse and he would fall up forever.

He doesn’t know why he ever thought logic should apply in a place like this.

“Not bad,” he assents, and Fai laughs, teetering forward on the railing in a way that would stop Kurogane’s heart if he weren’t aware of the man’s real nature. 

“‘Not bad’, he says in the face of a liminal space where the river meets the stars.” Light from far-away galaxies and the city below bounces off the water’s surface and makes Fai seem even more strange and ethereal than usual. His eyes reflect the night sky like two pools of glass. “You’ve been a surprise since the first day we met.”

“And _you’ve_ been infuriatingly cryptic.” Kurogane doesn’t fear the dizzying fall to the water that seems so much higher than it should, but he doesn’t tempt fate the way Fai does by sitting on the handrail. He rests against it instead, leaning forward with his weight balanced mostly on his forearms. Looking straight down mirrors the effect of staring at the sky in reverse, and looking too long at Fai poses a different danger altogether, so he tries to keep his eyes on the horizon. Logically, he knows the real Tower Bridge isn’t actually this tall, but whatever rules form this place pay as much attention to the laws of space as they do time. 

“You still haven’t explained why you brought me here,” he presses. He has no idea how the passage of time works here, if it works at all, but he _feels_ tired. The hour is late and the shots they knocked back haven’t helped his exhaustion. The night must come to an end.

“Give it just a minute! You’ll see soon enough.” Fai huffs, pressed so close at his shoulder that Kurogane can feel the puff of air against his cheek. (The bruises are too easy to see when he glances, stark and flaring in his sight to a beat he doesn’t want to hear.)

“Fai…” He doesn’t know what he intends to say, or why Fai winces at the sound of his own name. He lets his gaze wander to the man beside him and tries not to think about ice cream and terrible vodka and how beautiful Fai is in moonlight.

“There.” Fai murmurs to himself before Kurogane can do anything ill-considered, face turning back towards the walkway, attention snapping to something Kurogane can’t see. “There you are, sweetheart.”

He doesn’t share Fai’s utterly insane flexibility, so he turns to follow the direction of Fai’s gaze instead. At first, he sees nothing. But sure enough, as he watches, a shadow appears—an absence where the reflection of light should fall. It solidifies slowly, in fits and starts until a whole other person stands on the walkway along with them.

The third figure on the walkway is tall, feminine. Her hair falls in long waves to her thighs, and the clothes she wears identify her as undeniably posh. She also seems absolutely terrified. Her legs buckle beneath her and she teeters toward the railing on the opposite side of the bridge, all that hair spilling everywhere as she shakes.

“Hey,” he starts toward her, only for Fai to put a hand on his arm, suddenly standing on the more-or-less solid ground at his side.

“She can’t hear you. She’s afraid of it. It shows her something different than you or I see.” Kurogane glances from the girl to Fai and back again, mind milling through it all. Fai brought him here to see something—told him to wait. Fai is a creature that drags people into falling and heights and endless spaces, and Fai wanted him to… what. Be reminded of that?

The unknown girl shrieks, staring straight down. From Kurogane’s perspective she’s on perfectly solid walkway, but perhaps she sees something different. “Do you get it yet?”

“Not at all,” he grouches, whirling back to his supposed date. He hears the girl whimper pitifully behind him and as the sound echoes, one of the bruises fades entirely from Fai’s skin. “What are you doing to her?”

“Ah, there it is. A much more reasonable question.” Kurogane can read the self-hate plain as day in Fai’s every move. He has a sense for anger now, he remembers, and Fai rages at himself even as he smiles beneath the lights.

Kurogane can hear the girl hyperventilating from here, and barely a fingerprint remains among the bruises that marred Fai mere minutes ago. He… he should feel much more torn about this than he does, Kurogane knows. His worry for the unknown girl should probably rank higher than his curiosity, but he hasn’t felt things quite the right way since the Song.

“An _answer_ , Fai.”

“ _I_ don’t do much at all. All I did was bring her here. Her own fear does the rest.” Fai stands there, wide open, full front turned to Kurogane and braced for… something. A blow? An accusation? The smile on his face looks plastic and the building drumbeat that threatens his mind tells Kurogane to wipe it off for him.

“So what, you just… drain the fear to heal?”

“To heal. To eat in a sense. To exist,” Fai shrugs. Ah, perhaps that finally explains the way he randomly inflicts vertigo on café customers.

Kurogane turns the thought over in his head, still trying to understand why Fai wants him to watch—what it means. He thinks he recognizes the way Fai braces himself as he talks, the strange mix of acceptance and longing. Fai is a man waiting for the moment of his own execution.

Idiot.

Eventually, the girl manages to quiet her own muted sobs. As they watch in silence, she rises to her knees and starts crawling, painstakingly slow and in an even line, toward the stairs. He can’t imagine the sort of hell this place feeds her, and he doesn’t think he cares to.

“Will it kill her?” He asks, as they both watch the unnamed person find her courage. He doesn’t know why he gives voice to the question… he feels like he should? He should care. But it almost frightens him how little the answer interests him. He still doesn’t know whether he can fully trust Fai, but if he has to price the cost of Fai’s existence… Well. He thinks the man is easily worth a few lives.

The rhythm in the back of his skull agrees.

Fai…. Hadn’t expected that question. His expression flickers, threaded for just a second with his own fear.

“I… No. Not this place. She can find the stair and it’ll take her back to the rest of reality, but—”

“Okay.”

“What do you mean, ‘okay’?!” Fai gapes.

“I don’t know what you want me to say instead. Terrorizing people is bad? You already know that.” The girl makes painstaking progress, but progress all the same as Fai looses a wordless hum of frustration at the impossible sky and begins to pace.

“Bad? Bad. Kuro-dummy, my continued existence relies on perpetuating people’s trauma.” He walks, back and forth, almost a mockery of how slowly the poor girl has to crawl.

“…you’ve already used that nickname once.”

“Please take this seriously!” Kurogane rolls his eyes and reaches out to catch Fai on the next pass. The slowly healing skin of his right hand pulls when Fai jerks to a halt, and he’ll pay for that later, but he can scarcely feel it now. Fai matters more, somehow, still. He stands defiantly just in reach, stubborn and afraid of things Kurogane can’t understand, chin tilted imperiously in Kurogane’s direction, somehow fragile and unyielding all at once.

Kurogane doesn’t have the energy to try to make sense of his own introspection, let alone Fai’s. He’d already known the blond for some kind of heights-and-space monster. Understanding that Fai does it to _exist_ doesn’t exactly change his mind about anything, but Fai seems to think it should.

“You do remember that if it weren’t for you, I would have _killed_ several innocent people by now, or has that slipped your mind?” He snaps.

“…That’s different.” Fai’s protest holds no real conviction. Kurogane chances a step closer, keeps his gaze pinned to Fai’s without any fear (at least, not of Falling). He gentles his hold on Fai’s wrist, certain he can feel the pulse of the man’s heart through the delicate skin there—too fast, but still very human.

(He can’t see the girl in his periphery any longer. Has she made it to the stair? Does he care?)

“Fai. Why did you bring me here?” He asks for the third time that night. Fai doesn’t seem to have as easy of a time controlling his expressions when they stand so close. He looks terrified and furious in turns, anger whirling in a dervish through him, aimed at everyone and no one.

“To show you the truth of this _thing_ you keep playing with. To let you see what it means to be a part of something like the Falling Titan. You were _supposed_ to walk away.”

And it clicks—what Fai meant to do. Fai had taken him out on a date like a prisoner enjoying his last meal. Fai had been grasping for a last fond memory to keep because he’d convinced himself somehow that when Kurogane knew the truth, he would leave.

“You are _such_ an asshole.” Kurogane swears, and means it with every iota of his being. Fai winces, thinking that maybe now his ploy has worked, and fuck that. Kurogane refuses to play his part in this self-sabotaging scenario Fai set up for himself. He steps closer instead, until they stand like two dancers in the dark.

In realistic terms he has no reason to stay. For all their meetings, he knows little to nothing about the man. But he knows… he knows the way Fai laughs when he really means it, and the strange kindness that keeps him dragging Kurogane back and away from the threshold of a nightmare. He knows the difference between Fai playing and Fai hiding behind a teasing mask, and the feel of Fai’s hand in his. He knows Fai will listen when he talks, and he knows this whole idiot plot is just the result of the dumbass way that Fai cares. “Walk away if you want, but I’m not moving.” 

“Why not?” Fai pleads, desperate and shaken, as if some fundamental law of the universe has just broken at his feet.

Kurogane doesn’t have the words to answer that. Because there are far worse things for him than falling, and maybe life without Fai might number among them? Because despite everything, he went and fell in love? Such words are far too heavy for the night air to hold them. So he—

He gives Fai every chance to back away, telegraphs his every move, but Fai only rests trembling fingers at the small of Kurogane’s back. Blond strands catch between Kurogane’s fingers as he cradles the back of Fai’s head, nearly knocking a too-loose hair tie free with the motion. “ _Why n—?”_ Kurogane leans down and kisses the words from his lips.

It’s a simple thing—no fireworks or rising background score. Just connection and warmth, the lingering taste of vodka and something like ozone. Careful, slow. He’s never tried to hold onto starlight before, but he thinks he might understand the feeling. He stands still, trying not to cling too tight to something beautiful lest he lose it entirely.

A vain task. He can already feel the moment slipping through his fingers as they break away and Fai’s eyes blink up at him. 

“Oh,” that voice rings soft and broken, hands still shaking and sending strange pulses through the healing skin of his back. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. You weren’t supposed to—”

“Fall?” Kurogane’s bitterness undercuts the humor of the word. “You’re a couple months too late for that.”

“Months?” Fai laughs in a pale imitation of the sound, a pitiful noise that tumbles out of him unwilling. “I can’t… I can’t be that. Whatever you think I am. I can’t save you from the War or even—”

“I don’t _care_.” One last try. One last desperate plea for Fai to let him stay. The butterfly’s touch against his back falls away and he knows, somehow, he’s lost. “ _Fai_.”

“You don’t understand.” Fai steps back. The night air feels somehow colder for every backward move Fai makes. The bruises that stained too-pale skin this evening have already faded, but Fai still rubs at the skin of his neck as he prevaricates. “I… There are things at stake, and I can’t—”

“So explain it to me.”

“I _can’t_.” Fai shouts, throat working furiously to fight against the tears that threaten him. “I can’t afford to.”

Fai is an idiot, and if he would just let Kurogane _help_ , he could—

Blue flashes, just once, and the liminal space Fai conjured dissolves around them like a cloud of fireflies until they’re left standing on the pavement south of the Tower Bridge. “You said I could walk away if I wanted. Did you mean it?”

That question kills the protest building on his tongue and Kurogane grimaces, heart already aching.

“I don’t want you to,” he allows himself, because the words are true. He can still taste vodka and ozone, and maybe he’s not thinking right, but—he knows that much.

“I can’t give you what you want, Kuro… Kurogane.”

He never thought the sound of his own damn name could hurt so much. He stands there, useless and stunned by the sound. “Please don’t look for me,” Fai murmurs, and with a single step and powers that let him fade out of reality, he leaves Kurogane behind.

…

He doesn’t know quite what to do after that.

He knows how to get home in the dark, sure, even this close to midnight. He knows he’s supposed to go home. He thinks he should probably try to look for the girl and make sure she makes it home too, but—he doesn’t think he’s the right person to do that right now. He needs to—

He finds a bus. How many transfers? One? Two? He can’t tell. The trip blurs together, mind still struggling to process the evening’s events. Nothing feels real.

It doesn’t hit him—doesn’t really solidify until he makes it off the last bus and stands miserable and alone in the early morning dark at his own apartment door for the second time in as many weeks.

Fai is a fool, and Kurogane far worse for scaring him off. He should have kept his hands to himself—kept his language a little less clear, and then maybe—

The door slams shut, and the sound seems to reverberate through Kurogane’s skull. It figures, doesn’t it? He’d known from the start they were doomed to end badly. What had he even thought—that Fai would care enough to stay just because he asked? The parts of Fai’s life outside the Cat’s Eye are completely alien to Kurogane—he doesn’t know a damn thing. (He hadn’t needed to know in order to care.) He’d been deluding himself to think Fai might be able to set anything aside—that maybe if signs pointed to Fai caring back, that might make the world okay.

As if a flood gate has fallen, anger washes his mind in a familiar haze. He wraps the feeling around himself like battle-armor, lets it coil over his wounded heart. Fine. Fine! If he’s fucked it up, then fine! If he becomes some kind of murder demon, then just _fucking_ fine. If Fai spends the next part of forever avoiding him, then that’s—

A strange sound shatters the rhythm of his thoughts and Kurogane looks up to see that he’s just punched straight into the wall.

Kurogane shakes drywall from his unbroken knuckles and storms his way to bed. Fuck it. He’s already lost the safety deposit anyway.


	6. Adagio

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adagio-
> 
> a movement or composition marked to be played at a slow tempo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a spot in here that still begs for an edit, but it will have to come later. What is time? 
> 
> Usual Dream Warnings apply.

_What brought the Song to Kurogane—that thrumming beat that pulses through his veins to the tune of violence and bids him play his part?_

_He knows better than to think it found him for some petty reason. Not the frustrations of his childhood or the daily annoyances that mark his working routine. Not the daily slights that chip away at his patience and set the old companion anger free from his control. No. the sorts of things that call the Song now are merely catalysts for a reaction that started long ago._

_Deep down, he must still know where it started, even if his mind has forgotten just enough to make life comfortable. The Song does not appear without a choice made—a step, a pivot into the arms of battle. And Kurogane had taken it._

(He listens to the not-a-voice that narrates a mockery of his thoughts and dreads the dream to come. He has not faced the nightmares in full for weeks. The thought of Fai had worked like a talisman to keep the worst of the dreams at bay, and like an intelligent beast they had retreated.

…He cannot muster the idea of Fai or Falling now without thinking of the bridge and the way it ended. There is nothing to go back to. There is no easy way out, and nothing waiting to distract him in the morning.

He should have known better than to go to bed angry.)

_He knows where it begins, even if he does not remember the how or why. He can scarcely think of his childhood home in that quaint neighborhood without imagining the smell of blood, so it must start there, right?_

_The details feel so strange—hyper familiar and impossible to recall in turns. The image of that fateful walk home comes to him so clearly he can see it every time he closes his eyes and so much as thinks of a sunset. But everything after he opens the door and finds his parents is…_

_He remembers the hospital—the way the nurses tiptoed around him—how they’d let him stay there for a few days “just in case” before they threw him headlong into the system. How had he gotten there? Someone must have driven him, right? He can’t have walked. Their house had been miles from the nearest hospital and he hadn’t known how to find it anyway. Someone must have—someone must have found him._

(He expects the cooling pavement and the well-trimmed suburban yards that meet his gaze when he gives up and opens his eyes, but not the violet tones of dusk that light the far horizon. The sun has already set, and instantly, the first note of _wrongness_ begins to play behind Kurogane’s thoughts.

Long, measured steps carry him to the familiar front door—too long for a child’s body. This sort of dream with its strange narration has always placed him back in his own past before with perfect clarity. Not so this time; when he reaches out to touch the broken handle he sees still-healing lines of stitches that curl around his palm toward his knuckles.)

_What must they have seen when they walked through the door that day? They would have smelled the bodies first, of course, just like he had. Flesh takes time to rot, but blood has a powerful iron odor, and organs do not cease function cleanly._

_They must have followed the scent to the kitchen in the dark. Had they thrown the lights? Or had they simply stumbled past the shadowed obelisks of furniture to find the killer’s latest victims. What sight awaited them there?_

(His feet lead him where they will—where the dream wills. His stomach churns at the thought of seeing his parents utterly ruined again. He has a hard enough time remembering their faces without the stain of gore, even when his dreams _don’t_ seek to remind him of the trauma. He thinks of fighting it. If he shuts his eyes and closes his heart, maybe he can turn the world off until he finds reality again, but something in him no longer cares enough to try.

He lets his gaze wander elsewhere as the dream forces him onward instead. The low light from the windows casts strange shadows over the living room, and he thinks, for just a moment, he sees something stirring there. He squints into the darkness at the foot of what had once been his mother’s favorite chair, craning his neck to look as his body continues its forward motion. He doesn’t catch a second glimpse of movement.

Maybe he imagined it.

Kurogane’s steps halt, and he knows, without a doubt, where he stands. He forces himself not to gag on the air and clenches his jaw tight as he turns back to look at his own personal hell.)

_A sea of red that covers linoleum flooring and catches strange reflections from the window—the carefully pieced together remains of two puzzles who used to be people… Kurogane can picture the scene, no matter how hard he tries to forget. Someone else must have seen it. Had they spotted him amongst the remains? Had they found a child, sick with grief and covered in viscera, shock-pale and wide-eyed as a geist?_

_No. No, he—he doesn’t think they had._

(Faced once again with that terrible scene, Kurgoane’s fingers itch with the imagined feel of blood. He glances from his shattered father to his ruined mother, trying to reconcile the empty pieces left behind with the way he remembered them. As a kid, he’d thought his father was invincible, staggeringly tall, and so strong. Mother always seemed strong in other ways—patient and unflappable with a sense of humor hidden behind her demure looks. He though her beautiful, hair so long it touched the ground, but that’s… Now that he sees them in his own form, he realizes how small they look. How young.)

_He’d tried to put them back together again, but it hadn’t worked, and he’d been… distracted. He can’t remember why, but he’d left the room. Where had his would-be rescuers found him then, and how? He’d known the house well and could have evaded most people, especially in the dark._

_Still… the adult human body contains five liters of blood, and there are nearly ten spilled and congealing on the floor. Kurogane had been drenched in it. He must have left a trail to follow._

(Entirely without his permission, his hand reaches out and flips the kitchen light on with a gentle, _thunk._ Kurogane winces, clenching his eyes tightly shut. The thin light from the window paints a terrible enough scene. He doesn’t need to remember every detail in perfect lighting. He doesn’t _want_ to…

- _Thunk-_

The strange noise echoes, and drives Kurogane to look. He fights for control of his own neck and turns away from the bodies, squinting at the world cautiously.

He doesn’t understand the sight that meets him at first—a mess of color in reverse that assaults his senses. The switch has not turned on any normal light. Instead, it has cast the whole dream in a mismatch of shades like an undeveloped photo—a world in negative. And on the floor, trailing from the gore back out through the kitchen doorway, he sees a set of footprints small enough to belong to a child.

- _Thunk_ -

Rings the sound again, everywhere and nowhere all at once. Kurogane realizes belatedly that it is the only thing he can hear. They usually kept a fan running in the summer, and the low hum of the fridge almost always ran as a constant annoyance in the background, but… in this strange, flipped space he hears nothing but the echo of that single beat. As if time has otherwise stopped.

Uneasy, he leaves his parents’ empty remains behind and begins to follow the trail.)

_Yes, he hadn’t wanted to, but he’d left them behind. There was… someone. Someone called to him? He can’t—_

_Whoever found him must have traced the footsteps, past the overturned lamp and the strange rent in the wall, up toward the stair and back again, each step like a soldier in a marching line of ants. They would have seen his mother’s latest sewing project knocked free from its place of pride on the stand behind the couch and tracked over carelessly—the scattered pins and the dotted stains of red—all standard signs of a struggle, except…_

_Hadn’t his parents died unaware? The accomplice shot them in the kitchen before cutting them to ribbons. It had been nearly instantaneous, and judging by the spatter and the state of their skulls… Kurogane may not have a coroner’s expertise, but he knows enough and remembers enough to agree with the report. _

_So why can he also remember the living room in such disarray? There must have been a reason._

(- _Thunk_ -

The echo stretches and morphs to a hollower sound—a lonesome drum beat—and dread flowers in Kurogane’s throat. Like a puppet, he follows the path the dream has set, footsteps lit like a glowing trail that winds over the destruction of his childhood home.

He—He _does_ clearly remember the sight of Mother’s project. He hadn’t even known what she was going to make it, but she’d used a gorgeous brocade that would have matched her eyes. He remembers seeing it one last time, pathetically crumpled and torn at one edge, bloody footprints skipped haphazard over the surface.

Why does he remember that?

- _Thunk­-_

Why does he remember… Father’s files fallen from the coffee table and scattered over the room—the way they’d fluttered into the air when he’d fallen down to dodge—dodge…

- _Thunk-_

The beat seems to match the slow march of seconds as he trails after the ghost of himself. He can only watch, horror dawning anew as a second set of footprints flickers into view, fades and pulses in time with the persistent sound. It crosses over the path of his child self, tells the story of a fight that returns to him with every step.)

_A fight? Yes. There must have been a fight. Perhaps… perhaps if the killer had never left. If the man who killed his parents had simply watched, amused by Kurogane’s vain struggle to repair them, perhaps he would have called from the hall and waited, intent on taking the full set._

_That must be how it went. He figured it for a nightmare all these years, but if Kurogane struggles past the haze of shock he thinks he can remember it—the way that man had stepped from the shadows and nearly cut his throat. He doesn’t know what drove his opponent to try the knife first, when he’d executed everyone else by gunshot. Perhaps he’d seen a child and thought Kurogane would be safe enough to kill the messier way. Perhaps—_

_(-Thunk-­_

Past the end table, back toward the door, and around the edge of the couch. The room he remembers from his childhood looks nothing like it should—a jumbled, stained mockery of itself. He knows, with sickening certainty, where the line will end. He can see it—a long buried memory tugging free in fits and starts like a blade from a wound.

- _Thunk­-_

He can hear the wet reverberation behind that single note of percussion now. His gaze drifts down and he catches the full, grisly scene. A kid, covered in blood, crouched over an adult’s body and looking like nothing more than the monster of a horror movie. Both hands clutch at the hilt of a long knife, and in time with the Song they bring it back down into the pulping flesh of a would-be assailant.

- _Thunk-_

The sound floods and pulses until the silence fades behind the shrieking of pipes and he... remembers this. He remembers the slick feel of the hilt sliding in his grip—startlingly familiar. That knife… He… this can’t be real, right? This is… he’s trapped in a nightmare, and it’s playing with his memories. This is all just—)

_Suicide, the papers said, but had he ever really believed that? What reason did the accomplice have to kill himself? Nothing tied him to the original cases. If he’d been just a little more careful, he could have made it out entirely without evidence. No, Kurogane didn’t want to remember, but he knows the truth of it._

_Father had been a truly great man, after all. And the police do so love their prosecutors. It would have been simple for the detective who found him to hide the truth. The man’s fingerprints were all over his gun and his methods tied him closely enough to the original criminal that his guilt and motive garnered no questions. No need to complicate things with a self-defense case, even one this messy. Especially not with that kid going through so much already, right?_

(- ** _Thunk_** -

The blade comes down, and the world flashes back to full color as Kurogane meets his own eyes, red as the blood that paints him. The song swells and he—)

Wakes up.

Kurogane hurtles himself into sitting so quickly that he pulls a muscle in his stomach. His lungs heave, brow damp with sweat as he tries to wipe the images from his mind.

He feels the hilt in his fingers before he sees it and he knows. He just _knows_ this is the same damn knife he’d seen his child-self hold in the dream.

He wants to write the whole thing off—just assume his stressed mind had simply grabbed the knife by his bedside in sleep, and the logic of dreams had twisted the sensation accordingly… He can’t lie to himself that way. Kurogane has gotten a feel for these sorts of things, working in Artifact Storage, after all. He knows an artifact when he sees it.

He _should have known it from the beginning_ , but somehow when he picked it up months ago, for all his paranoia he hadn’t thought to look deeper. Had the knife done that too? Made him ignore his own better judgment?

He doesn’t even want to consider the rest—whether the dream held any truth at all—whether as a kid, he’d actually…

His stomach churns with disgust. He drops the damn _artifact_ on the mattress and doesn’t even bother to look for the clock as he rummages for clothes. He has to get out of here. He doesn’t want to think about this. It’s a crazy idea, just a nightmare, right? Kurogane just has to get himself together enough to find Fai and—

…

Kurogane just has to get himself together enough to go back to work. He probably has plenty of things left to do from last night. Those itemization reports aren’t going to sort themselves. He’ll go to work. He’ll leave the knife.

He _can’t_ leave it, he understands with slow, dawning horror. He has held it too long, fed it too much anger. It has a tether in him now, wound through his veins and bound in the distant sound of a piping echo.

Well… Fuck.

* * *

Kurogane has been told on more than one occasion that he has what some might consider a contrary streak. He doesn’t know whether he agrees, but when he discovers he physically can’t abandon the knife, he immediately wants to lose it, so perhaps people have a point.

After the nightmares of last night, the very sight of the damn thing makes his skin itch. He doesn’t know whether his struggles with the Song result directly from its influence or… No, no he hadn’t _had_ the knife during the fight with the wax figurine. There must be something else. Either way, he knows the presence of an artifact weapon can’t possibly _help_. Not if it has anything to do with those dreams.

He would have fled to Fai, before last night. Fai said he couldn’t fight the slow transformation into something _other_ , but Fai’s company and the solace of his High Places have consistently quieted the raging _something_ in Kurogane’s head.

Now, he… He’s a mess and panic grips him every time he catches the glimpse of something red or hears the beginnings of music. A car drove by with the radio too loud as he was walking to the tube station and he’d nearly lost it. He sees mixed up memories when he closes his eyes and he can’t tell any longer whether what he remembers actually matches reality. He can’t focus. Anger over everything—the world, his past, Fai’s actions, his own swiftly slipping control—ebbs and surges like an unstoppable tide. He finds himself livid and ill in turns. He wants to _banish_ this feeling more than anything, but even so…

He can’t go to Fai. Fai asked him not to go looking, so he looks for the next best thing instead. 

In the morning hours, the Tower Bridge has no otherworldly presence. Already, vehicles and the usual throng of people mill over its surface—tourists and Londoners in an indistinguishable mass of humanity. No entrance to the other version of the bridge makes itself obvious, but then Kurogane has no idea what to search for. He feels slow and stupid as he stares up at it from the nearby walkway on the southern bank of the Thames.

Fai had simply _gone_ there. He didn’t seem to have to do anything, just a flash of blue and the world shifted. There has to be a method to it. He must have _something_ he can do.

Kurogane closes his eyes and thinks as hard as he can about the endless expanse of the stars ( ~~and the way they’d reflected in Fai’s gaze~~ ). The river had seemed to plunge down and down forever—bottomless oceans and scaffolds that tower so high the atmosphere disappears ( ~~the warmth of Fai’s hand in his as they walk through High shortcuts that have never existed~~ ).

For an instant, he hears something promising—A strange sound that echoes inside his skull, an eerie creaking noise like the groaning of a boat hull on the water. He opens his eyes, wary, and sees—

Nothing unusual. The utter mundanity of the London morning in late summer torments him with its stubborn presence. With a jolt of pain, he realizes the source of the sound; he has begun to grind his teeth. 

Kurogane exhales slowly from his nose and makes a conscious effort to still his jaw. This is idiotic. He doesn’t need ( ~~Fai~~ ) some kind of fancy other-world to get rid of the knife. Artifact or no, he’s stronger than it. He can just… throw it in the river. Just, take the knife _out_ of his pocket. And Throw. It.

He used to liken the artifacts to possessed objects, back when he still thought ghosts or angry spirits must drive the whole mess. He certainly feels possessed now as he fights his own arm for control. He walked here on his own two feet, of his own free will, but the instant he musters the resolve to throw the damn thing, his body locks of its own volition. It feels like dreaming awake—like needing to turn away from the horrible memories that haunt him and having no control over his limbs.

No. Kurogane left this thing in his room for days before. He can live without it. _It doesn’t control him._ His own arm fights him for every inch, muscles straining and pulling but he gets his hand around the hilt in his pocket.

He doesn’t know how much time he spends, fighting against the invisible force that holds his arm still. He has to battle just to hold still, keep his grip tight around the handle. Slowly, in fits and starts he draws the knife free.

- _Thunk_ ­-

The sound echoes and the color of the world seems to flicker between reality and the negative tones of his dream. The noise of the world around him dulls to nothing, though he can still see the bodies milling over the bridge. He can’t stop to contemplate the switch. He doubles down, pushes harder. The knife is just trying to trick him—it knows he can win. He raises it a little higher, a little higher. The beat picks up, doubles back on itself in echo, plays a note to counter every pulse of his heart.

- _Thunk-_

- _Thunk-_

- _Thunk-_

All at once, his every nerve cries out. The healing wounds over his body set themselves alight with agony and he pushes past it with shaking breath. He can ignore it. It doesn’t _matter_. He just wants to _beat this thing_. He doesn’t care if it kills him. He forces his own arm up and back, prepares to throw—

 _Ta_ - _Tap-Ta-Tap-Ta-Tap-_

Kurogane freezes in place as the sound shifts in tone. The distant echo of pipes rises behind it, and once again the siren call of the Song knocks at his consciousness. It promises him enough strength to defeat anything, even one of its own artifacts.

He could feed his anger and frustration and beat the spell that holds him, but… The Song would only take him instead.

He… he can’t… He swore he would choose death first. He just hadn’t realized that particular option might not make the table. There has to be a way to avoid both… right?

Eventually, in the face of his indecision, the Song and the anger that sustains him both fade. The force that controls him drops the fucking knife back into his pocket, and Kurogane can’t do a damn thing to stop it. Impotent rage burns like a poison in his soul. He wants to _kill_ the thing that has trapped him, but that desire only pushes him further into its control. If he could just smother it—just tear it out of himself—but every vicious thought heralds the whisper of a new refrain.

Kurogane doesn’t know how long he spends just standing there, trying not to fall apart and staring sightlessly at the glint of morning light on the Thames. Already, the crowd on the path behind him begins to swell, and the regular sights and sounds of reality filter through his temporary lapse.

He doesn’t know what to do. If he gave into the Song in a place like this...

He refuses to turn into the creature of indiscriminate violence from his nightmares, but the War or the knife will lead him there sooner or later. His control already wears thin. A few more mixed up dreams like the one last night, and he won’t have enough of his own mind left to care.

Fai had clearly asked for space last night, and Kurogane wants to respect that. But he needs options. ( ~~He’s losing his mind, and terrified beneath the anger. He needs the comfort of a friend.~~ ) He needs a place where the Song can’t reach him. 

He heads for the café. Just one more ask. Just one request, and he’ll leave Fai alone. For good, if the man wants. Kurogane would owe him that and more.

* * *

Before he really understood anything about anything, back when he’d brushed his nightmares off as mere bad dreams and thought only artifacts could manipulate the fabric of reality, he’d used coffee as his escape.

The very smell of the stuff used to soothe him, at least a little bit. No matter how bad of a night he’d had, or what madness he had to look forward to at work that day, stepping into Cat’s Eye and drinking a black coffee had served as some sort of mini-ritual to keep the world at bay.

Somewhere along the line, the dance with Fai and the constant plunge into the Fall had started to serve that purpose instead. Like a junkie, Kurogane had come to seek the blank-minded panic that only Fai could cast him into. And through the banter and the stupid nicknames and the thinly-veiled concern, that addiction had transferred to Fai himself.

He wishes he could find some way to work that process in reverse.

“And a black coffee for Mr. Black,” Fai’s coworker, Oruha, sets his cup down on the bar. The bitter ache that surges as he hears that stupid nickname honestly surprises him. How strange to hear the words he hoped for spoken with the wrong voice. Oruha, and not Fai, because Fai is not here.

Kurogane has known from the instant he stepped through the café door that Fai hadn’t come in yet—has probably not been in for a while. The crowd that packs the line and clutters the space by the bar presses too close together—too claustrophobic. Fai has a way of making crowded places seem impossibly emptier. 

“Thanks,” he murmurs, and takes the drink in hand. In a daze, he lowers the heat sleeve first to examining the cup beneath it. Fuck knows what kind of doodle or “hidden message” Fai saw fit to hide beneath this time. He swears—

Kurogane yanks the sleeve back up with more force than he really means to use, rocking the cup and splashing himself with hot liquid.

He barely feels it.

“Are you alright, Mister Black?”

“Perfect,” he bites. If he had more presence of mind, he might think about the fact that Fai had apparently talked about him to his coworkers enough to teach them that ridiculous name. But the thought doesn’t occur to him until much later. So much has happened in the last twenty-four hours that he can no longer muster the mental energy to process.

He eyes the table near the exit instead, thinking of another morning that feels like a _lifetime_ ago. Does he want to even pretend at the hope that Fai might come in for a later shift today?

“You know, I think he’s out for a while.” Oruha prompts, watching with a shrewd eye as he mulls the dilemma over. Her words trickle through his comprehension like molasses through a sieve.

“Sorry, what?”

“Fai,” she laughs. She keeps herself busy prepping drinks for her counterpart on the line, perfectly at ease even as the line behind the cash register stalls. “He’s not on schedule for a while. I didn’t ask why—frankly, not my business—but I figured he’d want you to know.”

Part of him—the twisted, paranoid part trained by Archive work that tells him nothing and no one is safe—wonders how much she knows. Is she in on it? Does she share Fai’s powers? Did he tell her about the bridge and the way Kurogane fucked it up? Are they both secretly laughing at his expense?

Did Fai know about the knife? Had he played Kurogane for a fool this whole time? Maybe everything had been a lie from the beginning. Maybe Kurogane had never really seen Fai’s true face, and all those plays at connection had only served as bait to drag him closer to the Song. Fai said he didn’t know much about the War, but he could easily be lying. It could _all_ be a lie.

In some ways, that irrational voice spins a reality kinder than the truth. If everyone is his enemy, he has no one left to disappoint. If the whole world allies against him, why should he bother to control his anger? It’s all justified. ( ~~If the Fai he fell in love with never existed in the first place, he could not possibly have lost anything.~~ )

He doesn’t have enough of himself left to be kind.

“Thanks for telling me.” Kurogane nods to the barista, turns away, and carries his coffee and his pride both back out to the pavement. The hum of the street graces him with a welcome respite from the din indoors. He steps just a few paces away from the exit to keep the walkway clear and just… stops.

He doesn’t know the time, but judging by the pace of morning traffic he probably already missed his usual start at work. He should walk. He leans back against the café wall and takes a burning sip of coffee instead.

The knife still weighs him down, burning bright in his awareness from its place at his side. He can’t hear the Song, not enough to matter, but every time his frustration surges he feels it approach on the air like the distant notes of an ice cream van. He wants to lash out at everyone and everything that dares to make noise nearby, but he can’t tell whether that means anything supernatural or simply comes as a natural result of bad sleep. Maybe both?

The coffee scalds his mouth and burns when he swallows, but he can’t bring himself to care. So, he thinks to himself, Fai’s gone. Gone for a while, gone. “Not on schedule,” gone. He takes a longer draught of coffee, but it doesn’t help the bitter taste.

Kurogane feels like such an idiot—of _course_ Fai left. Who would say, “ _Please don’t look for me_ ,” and just turn up for work the next day like nothing happened? But like a fool, he’d hoped…

It doesn’t matter. Nothing has changed. Kurogane still has to find a way to stop “becoming” something he hates the very thought of. He knows he fucked up with Fai in more ways than one, but he can’t think on it too long without summoning anger to the fore—anger at Fai for making him feel this way, at himself for letting feelings cloud his better judgement, at the world. He can’t afford to dwell. “ _You have to stop feeding it_ ,” Fai had said, and Kurogane thinks at least in that moment, he hadn’t lied.

He breathes in steam and lets his eyes slip closed for just a moment. The rhythms of the world continue on around him, oblivious to his personal troubles. Stressed out office workers and people who had just a little too much fun last night slog themselves through the coffee shop door, in and out, barely even glancing in his direction. The busy street rushes by, cars and busses filled with strangers he will likely never pass again in his lifetime. None of them have any idea. Not even the weather bothers to look thematically appropriate for Kurogane’s mood—flooding the street with warm yellow sunshine.

So now what?

He can’t stop this on his own. It pains him to admit, but he just… doesn’t have enough control to leave the knife behind without tipping into the Song headlong. He has already lost too much of himself to it. The fucking sixth sense for other people’s anger that buzzes in the back of his mind like a constant feedback loop indicates that _quite_ clearly. He needs a way to cut the connection, but if Fai’s gone, then—

Then…

Kurogane’s eyes flicker open, and he takes a long, savoring sip. With a last considering look at the café façade, he pushes away from the wall and starts to walk.

He needs something otherworldly that can overwhelm the supernatural bullshit stringing him along. Fai could have done that, maybe. But he doesn’t need Fai. He works in goddamn Artifact Storage. If anything exists that can take him out of reality, he’ll find it there.

Barring that… well, he guesses he’ll have to figure out whether the force that won’t let him toss the knife into the river would stop him jumping instead.


	7. Affrettando

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Affrettando -   
> MUSIC: To play in a rushing or hurrying manner, to pick up tempo and carry onward

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On to the merry-go-round we go! 
> 
> This chapter is meant to be a little confusing and non-linear, so I apologize if it doesn't come through well. 
> 
> It is ALSO the last one I can upload before work. Hope you enjoy what's up so far! I plan to finish out before day's end. Wish me luck!

* * *

_He dreams. Terrible nightmares, of course, but every once in a while when the black of unconsciousness sweeps him under, he dreams of other things too. Abstractions, strange scenes and illogical novelties—all the usual symptoms of sleep as the mind struggles to process its reality._

_The city in the rain fits the shape of those more sensible dreams—an unfamiliar landscape ruled by the song of the storm—streetlights that cast their orange glow in strange reflections over ripples in the dark. The few people that dot the space bustle past quickly, muted and indistinct._

_He stands on a shadowed stretch of pavement, unnamed shops stacked beneath lightless flats all around him. The Song plays over the whole scene like a narrator, and in the dream it does not drive him to stab at every person passing by. It simply is._

_Rising violin strings warn him first—music transitioning into something slow and wistful—and he sees a familiar, thin silhouette step into one of the many alleyways that spiral from the storming road._

_Hands in his pockets, soaking with rain, he follows the sunlight trail of blond hair in the dark._

* * *

Kurogane knows when he resolves to pursue unknown artifacts in Storage that he hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of coming out of this okay.

Artifact Storage has a reputation for a reason, and he’s seen its bullshit first hand. He could die, sure, but if he acts too recklessly, he might have far worse fates to fear. He can’t let that stop him. After that last nightmare ( ~~and without Fai~~ ), things only get worse. The distant call of the Song looms closer every day, dreams more and more violent, and the numbing poison of apathy begins to slip through his veins. He has to figure this out before he loses himself to it completely.

That doesn’t leave him a whole lot of time for caution. Especially not when he has so much to comb through. _Something_ in the archives could cut the Song out without eating him or turning him into an even worse monstrosity, but figuring out which of the many, many collection pieces might do that poses the real difficulty. The Magnus Institute has an absolutely massive collection of artifacts, both “real” and mundane. Kurogane has to assume it holds the largest collection of its kind anywhere, or else some other archive should have a much more competitive death rate. Examining all of it, trying to get a handle on each object’s limitations would take years.

(Yesterday he’d dreamed of cutting his way through an endless battlefield between columns of men grinding each other to bloody dust. The boom of distant cannons kept the beat as the dying screams of soldiers leant themselves to the melody, and when he woke he could not stop himself from humming the tune.)

He doesn’t have years.

He figures he can start with what he knows and try to go from there. Unfortunately, what he knows doesn’t amount to much. He never really had to care what the artifacts _did_ outside of killing people or trying to escape. He struggles through artifact reports and acquisition record notes for all of two days before he gives up and decides to start with the obvious.

“Kurogane… what are you doing?” Shougo stares at him warily from the doorway that leads to their office as he removes the lid from the umbrella’s newest case and sets it gently against the side. Acid damage already renders the texture strange and frosted, despite the fact that this case hasn’t even lasted a month yet.

Kurogane considers his coworker a moment, already half-way to pulling the knife from his pocket. 

“Research,” he says blandly, and dangles the still-hilted blade into the case like a man feeding live crickets to a spider. He waits for his body to fight back, certain that any minute now his arm will lock—the song will surge and start to play over the frayed nerves of his control. Surely. _Surely_.

Nothing stops him. His hand opens, and the knife falls into the case and against the umbrella’s folded fabric canopy with a soft _thud._ Kurogane frowns at it.

“Research,” Shougo repeats the word, as if he’s never heard it before. “You know you’re breaking at least four protocols for handling that thing right now, right?”

The Song hasn’t started and the Knife didn’t stop him. The umbrella took a little damage when he killed the wax figurine with it, but it clearly still has corrosive power. The damaged glass remains as proof of that already. Maybe it just doesn’t have the same strength as before? He reaches down, just to see for himself if maybe—

“Suwa, I _swear_ if you touch that thing with your bare hands again—” Kurogane pauses, fingers inches from the umbrella’s surface, and turns slowly to stare Shougo down. The man’s anger hums like a prelude between them, urging Kurogane to move first. Frustration and disappointment whittle his temper to a vicious point. He wants to hear the end of that threat—wants to make good on a better one.

Maybe Shougo sees as much in his expression. He balks, unable to meet the murder in Kurogane’s eyes. “Look, just… Whatever _this_ is, I won’t tell the boss. But could you at least use the damn tongs?” He motions toward said object where it rests gently against the wall behind the stand.

Kurogane pulls his hand free of the case and examines it. Pink, irritated skin meets his gaze. He hadn’t gotten closer than a few inches to the umbrella’s surface, but his palm already itches with minor damage… Yeah, he supposes, it’s functioning at about the usual rate. He picks up the Teflon-coated tongs with a pointed glance to Shougo.

“Why do you care?”

“Why do I—Come on man, seriously?” He gestures widely as he sputters, scarf at his neck fluttering with the motion. “Because we work together? Because I’d rather not watch someone I know dissolve in acid in front of my face today?”

The part of Kurogane’s mind dedicated to doubting other people wonders whether Shougo just doesn’t want to lose another Storage coworker before they can get a newbie to foist the paperwork onto. He hums, clacking the tongs once with his right hand and ignoring the tug of healing scars. He doesn’t think the umbrella will do anything, or the knife would have stopped him. No harm leaving it to rest there for a little while though maybe.

He pauses, content to watch the knife fail to dissolve in silence.

“Look, is this about the other week?” Shougo, apparently, does not share the same prerogative. A muscle in Kurogane’s jaw twitches and he reminds himself he does not want to kill anyone. ( ~~Else~~?) He can recognize that at least some of the annoyance that banks higher with every word Shougo speaks does not truly belong to him. That does not make it any easier to control.

“…No.”

“Because you know… You were messing with this thing then too. And it’s never good news when someone fixates too much on an artifact. I mean, you _know_ that. You’ve been here longer than me. If you were a researcher, you wouldn’t be allowed access—”

His jaw pops, straining beneath the effort of keeping himself from tearing into his well-meaning coworker. Maybe he didn’t wind up fixated on the _umbrella_ , but Shougo’s accusation still hits pretty close to home. The man’s not wrong to worry. Shougo has attempted a perfectly reasonable conversation with perfectly reasonable concerns, and Kurogane wants to break his face for it.

“I _said_ , no.” He growls. “Listen, this won’t take long. Maybe a few more minutes. Could you go... Not be here?” 

Shougo frowns, starts to retort, and pauses. His gaze catches on something just behind Kurogane. “Sorry, I… are you bleeding?”

Kurogane frowns and looks down at his hands. Both seem currently intact, if a little damaged and scarred beyond repair. No open wounds, at least. Then he follows Shougo’s stare to the case.

“...Of course.” He grouches, staring with resignation at the drops of blood that blossom over the umbrella’s canopy everywhere the knife touches. He breathes deep and uses the tongs to fish the knife free. It comes out pristine, stainless, and without even a hint of corrosion.

“Wait. Okay, is that _knife_ bleeding?” Shougo sputters, rushing forward to get a better look.

“No, the umbrella is.” Kurogane drops the knife hilt first into his left hand without concern, somehow certain that no residual acid would cling to it. He can almost hear it humming when It touches his skin, not a scratch on the damn thing.

“Oh, ‘No, the umbrella is,’ he says, like that’s normal.” Shougo stares as he sets the tongs back down and lifts the lid back into place. “How do you know? Does it do that any time you set an object on it? Is it just knives? Just that one in particular?”

“Do you really want to know the answer to any of those questions?” He should have waited to have Storage to himself. He resolves to make sure the place is empty before trying anything else.

Shougo frowns, crossing his arms over his chest. “Come on, man. I know we’re not really… _friends_ or anything. But I’d also kind of like for you to not die.”

“I’ll be careful,” Kurogane lies, sliding the knife into his pocket. Well…. He never thought he’d manage to break it on the first try, but it might have been nice. One attempt down, several hundred to go, he supposes. He nods in the face of his coworker’s confusion, picks the itemization report he’s been checking, and moves to the next row. He’ll make sure he doesn’t have company next time.

* * *

(The narrated memory dreams ease off, after that last one. They leave him with endless pools of crimson and eternal battlefields instead—red skies where blood falls like rain, the silver flash of a knife, and always, always, a fight.

This one is different. He ducks a knife slash and stumbles back to the stair of his childhood home, limbs too small to move the way he thinks he should. His head spins, thoughts churning in a mess of adult mind and childhood memory and dream logic.

He knows where he is—knows _what_ this is. He could never forget the face of his parents’ murderer, even if the time between strikes leave him little room to speculate. The knife sings between them, just as at home in another’s hand with the promise of blood on the wind.

“ _Fight back, little boy_ ,” the monster laughs, a snarling mass of wounds in one instant and the forgotten face of his nightmares in the next. Kurogane stumbles as his calves hit the staircase, and he falls just in time to miss the next wide swing.

He watches death approach, wild-eyed and panicking. He doesn’t know what to do— _the song sits on the edge of his hearing, and killing this asshole would be worth it—_He’s still reeling from the… the way he found the kitchen. This isn’t real. None of this is real, right? The smell makes him sick, and everything he touches is—this can’t be real.

Down comes the knife again, and Kurogane bolts, driven by instinct to barrel into the man’s knees and scamper past. He darts for the couch, yelping as the flash of metal gouges into his arm. More red surges over his skin— _It’s fine. It’s nothing. There’s a lamp on the table he could shatter to make a weapon. Just Listen to the Song and—_ he wants to shriek and cry and run as far as he can. He wants to live. He doesn’t know what he could possibly do when his parents… when his parents couldn’t.

He knocks Father’s files off the table as he bolts past and the pages flutter through the air, granting him just enough cover to escape the next bite of the knife.

“ _Come on, brat, either fight me or die like the others_ ,” the man growls, voice shifting between something human he barely remembers and a rattling gasp he does not. 

He knows he can’t keep this up forever. He’s already bleeding, and the wounds sting. He just—

He’s just so…

 _Angry_.

He _hates_ this man, with everything he is. He doesn’t understand why this happened and he doesn’t care to. He wants his parents back, but if he can’t have that then…

He wants to live, but he wants to end his parents’ murderer _far more_.

The killer laughs as determination firms in his expression. Fear makes his skin feel too hot and too cold, but he can ignore it. There’s something there—some strange rhythm found between his terrified heartbeat and the pattern of the man’s breath. It rings out like a song, and he thinks, if he listens…

Kurogane doesn’t know if this ever really happened—whether the knife simply feeds him these images or his own mind has twisted the stress of memory and his excess anger into something new and vindictive. But he watches through his own eyes as the knife comes down and he _catches_ it.

The blade travels straight through his palm and sticks, metal grating against bone. It _hurts_ worse than anything he’s ever felt in his life. He shouldn’t be able to weather it—shouldn’t be able to move past the shock, but the Song floods his veins and hums through his bones. Beneath the killer’s confused gaze, he yanks his hand and takes the knife with it, slippery with his own blood.

The Song loves him, the knife _sings_ , and his parents’ killer is a _dead man_.)

* * *

At what point does he just give up and stop sleeping altogether, Kurogane wonders, swirling the coffee in his cup and trying valiantly not to think of all the reasons the question occurs to him.

Hot liquid sloshes and spirals, an easy thing to fixate on as he tries to escape his racing thoughts. He’d taken the lid off to let it cool. Burning coffee doesn’t seem to damage him any longer if he drinks it, but he doesn’t want to confront that fact or just what it means. Not today and not after a dream like that.

The dog days of summer drag to their end, sunrise starting ever-later. Sluggish morning light cuts red through the café window and for just a moment the liquid in his cup looks like… He fumbles for thin plastic and puts the lid back on.

“Good seeing you this morning, Mr. Black!” Oruha calls across the room as he stands and rushes for the door.

Kurogane manages enough effort to give her a wave as he goes, desperate to ignore the tang of iron that he _knows_ he must be hallucinating. He keeps the cup covered and doesn’t take another sip until he forgets the sight of it filled to the brim with viscous red.

He is _not_ letting this ruin coffee for him, damn it.

* * *

_The fading after-image of gold leads him through a twisting labyrinth of narrow alleyways. He follows—under overhangs and over old brick, through puddles that drench him to the knee as the sky pours down, unceasing. Over all, the Song weaves a haunting melody in melancholy strings that draw high, slow notes between staccato beats of rain. Melancholy, though he does not know for whom._

_The music slows, pauses, finds the tempo once again. He sweeps around a wall of shadowed brick and into a tiny courtyard. Old tower blocks loom on every side, threaded by fire escapes. The buildings pack so tightly together that they shield the cobblestone below from most of the rain, and yet… somehow the space feels too large._

_Of course it does. Fai has always had that effect on things._

_“You’ve learned a few tricks since I saw you last,” eyes of Deep Blue cast their gaze into the dark, twin points of light in the thick veil of night that render the world around them dull in comparison._

_Kurogane says nothing and stalks closer. He keeps his head tilted to hear the Song, listening for the rapid tap-tap-tap of a quickening pulse or the heady shriek of fear. He hears neither. Only the notes of that same, ancient sadness._

_Just a step away, but still the space between them looms so wide. He stands still and waits for something to happen—for the dream to shift, for something to sweep him into the undertow of violence, for—_

_For Fai to reach out, blue eyes narrowed with concern. Fai’s hand rests so warm against the skin of his cheek… he cannot help but lean into the touch. “You’re looking a little worse for wear, Kurogane,” Fai sighs._

_The faintest edge of longing worms its way through the apathy that guards Kurogane’s heart._

_“You never used to call me that,” he blurts. His voice sounds more like a growl these days, but Fai doesn’t seem to mind._

_“I know.” Fai’s melody surges and sings a tragedy that belies the easy smile painted over his expression. “But then I went and liked you too much.”_

_Kurogane hums, one scarred hand rising to press against the back of Fai’s. He clings to contact like a man scrabbling before a fall, desperately wondering whether he’ll remember this in the morning. So strange to feel anything outside the heady rush of anger. He had almost forgotten the sensations of want and loss._

_“Have you come to kill me, Soldier of the War?” The question jars him from his thoughts. Kurogane pauses, listening for the cue as he considers—(Not Fai. Never Fai. He doesn’t want—)but nothing comes. Fai could not feed the Song, so it does not beg his death._

_“Wouldn’t be worth it. You’re not afraid enough,” he croaks, echoing words he scarcely remembers from a lifetime ago._

_Fai laughs, but the sound rings out in minor key._

* * *

Whether or not Shougo says anything, somehow his boss finds out that he made the umbrella bleed. He gets chewed out far worse than the last time he tried to suggest a Teflon case—spends the whole lecture clenching his teeth until his skull aches and forcing himself to ignore the rising tune that builds with every syllable.

“ _Don’t feed it_ ,” he reminds himself, lets the thought cycle over and over like a mantra. He misses most of the words he probably needs to pay attention to, but in the end he succeeds in weathering them without resorting to murder, so Kurogane considers the meeting a success. Even if he does get assigned all desk work and taken off the storage floor until “further notice.”

He has far less of a social life than those he works with. He can afford to stay late. He planned to act only when he has Storage to himself from now on anyway. So, during the day, he buries himself in outgoing budget approvals, incoming research requests, incident reports and acquisition records. But in the evening, once Storage goes still, he runs… experiments.

 _Saturn devouring his Son_ seems a natural place to start, safe in the controlled humidity room and glutted with the assumed remains of the last new hire. Despite its two dimensional existence, it _ate_ someone somehow. It must be able to warp reality to manage something like that. 

Kurogane settles the knife in his hand and waits, alone in the room with at least a dozen other cursed paintings and fragile books all awake and frightfully aware of his presence. He watches, eyes narrowed, entirely unsure what he expects. The minutes tick by, but Kurogane has all the time in the world. He doesn’t know how it operates. He’s moved it before with gloves, so he doesn’t think it can just… grab people at random. There has to be some trick to it. Is it like Fai’s space on the bridge? Can it only show itself to those who fear it?

Perhaps not. Beneath Kurogane’s scrutiny, as the long minutes stretch to hours, the image of Saturn turns its head. Its mouth drips with illustrated gore, wild eyes roving as the figure seems to process the world on the other side of the canvas. Kurogane watches back, turning the knife idly over his fingers. 

And then—it sounds idiotic, but Kurogane honestly does not know how else to describe this—the painting begins to _scream_.

The shrieking sound echoes, high and inhuman like the squeal of a pig led to slaughter. Saturn’s mouth stretches impossibly large, and the child in his hands twists unnaturally to add its voice to the drone. Paint shimmers, the frame shudders, and as Kurogane watches it starts to weep. Thick, viscous globs of red-stained oil that smell of rancid meat drip down the wall and start to pool on the floor. He doesn’t envy Shougo finding the mess during morning rounds.

Kurogane rolls his eyes, turns, and leaves the room. Alright, so not that one.

And not the copy of H. G. Wells’ _The Time Machine_ that occasionally rips holes in reality, or the cast-iron pan that should run more than hot enough to melt steel. The accountant’s ledger that remains inexplicably damp no matter where it sits almost works, he thinks. He manages to cling to it long enough to hear the sound of rain and feel the rush of water at his feet before the knife catches on. It rings out through the prelude to the Song—a jarring, sour note that shakes him from control. Before he can stop himself, his hands snap the book shut, and perfectly dry reality resolves around him.

He’s thought to try the parachute buried somewhere in A, but ( ~~he doesn’t want to think so inescapably of Fai and memories of the time they spent in high places~~ ) it has a fairly clear track record. People need to jump with it to entreat the sky to eat them, and he hasn’t had many opportunities for a skydive lately.

Certainly, he can’t try the bottled dark. He knows it could take him some place other. He remembers the chill of the glass—the certainty that if he touched a single drop, he would never see the light of day again. He stalks toward the extra-shadowed shelving area of L to test it out, but… the knife feels strangely eager in his hands. Kurogane only needs to take a second look at the pitch of the vial to understand. The darkness writhes with unseen creatures—monsters to flood the unknown. The knife and the song both want nothing more than to fight them… best not to hand the Slaughter enemies to kill if he wants to starve it out. He doesn’t know much, but he knows at least that.

On and on, the failures stretch, a different attempt almost every night. They don’t all disappoint him without leaving a mark. The taxidermied raven takes its bloody due when it gouges a rent in his ribs. (He gets another lecture when the thing is found headless in its case the next day.) He spends a whole week burning with fever after he makes the mistake of testing the knife against an undying posy usually displayed in area T. (Admittedly, not his most well-reasoned attempt.) And the broken mirror from Area W deals a different kind of damage.

He picks it up to look—just once. Researchers who request it keep talking about other worlds and reflections of reality, so he figures it’s worth a try. He has started to get more than a little desperate by this point, so he doesn’t take any real precautions—just plucks the busted compact from its display and tries to stare long enough into shattered fragments of glass to leave this realm behind.

It doesn’t transport him anywhere. That’s not what it’s _for_.

Paranoia rams through Kurogane’s mind like a freight train as he catches sight of the creature over his shoulder—a terrible visage of a man, tall and naked, covered in more wounds than skin. It catches sight of itself in the reflection and _smiles_ , red trailing from its bloody lips. Its horrible face reflects on every single shard, twisted into a strange fractal of violent glee.

Kurogane sets the mirror down and turns to face the thing slowly. He _knows_ before he looks that he will see nothing but empty air. He keeps the knife ready anyway, eyes narrowed and body held low as he makes his way carefully back through the rows of storage.

The creature doesn’t reappear. Not that evening, never again _directly_. Just… when Kurogane’s not paying attention, he catches glimpses of it. From that point on, when he passes his own reflection, in bus windows and shop fronts and the mirrors of parked cars, he sees it from the corner of his eye.

A mild symptom, as far as artifacts go, maybe. Still. He hardly needs more reasons to feel high strung.

He has to figure this out—has to do it without pushing himself into the Song even faster. The mirror was a mistake that leaves him shaken, but he keeps looking. Whatever he uses has to be able to sever his connection to the War, or else remove the knife so quickly that the Song doesn’t have time to tempt him. He makes lists throughout the day, takes cues from old research requests when he hits a dead end and starts digging deeper—finding quiet artifacts he’s only ever known by the number on their shelf. Older things—items tucked back into careful boxes that no one ever seeks to take a look at or needs to know more about.

Things like the Lepidopterarium.

* * *

(Dreams shift, slide, start to bleed into reality as he sleeps less and less until he cannot truly tell where waking begins.

Kurogane wanders the endless field of a great battle, listening to the chorus of a million men dying. He looms larger than his skin, blade in hand, surging with the Song as he cuts the throats of those who lie defeated and gasping at his feet. The pipes whine, pitched to a painful high and Kurogane… blinks. He stares through dark glass into the deeply shadowed tunnel of the tube. The train’s breaks screech again, high-pitched sound overpowering the hum of the other riders and the mechanical voice announcing the next stop.

He drags himself to the Institute and spends the whole day wondering whether he ever actually woke up, echo of a battle hymn resounding in his skull.

On another memorable occasion, he goes through the motions of an entire day at his desk. He slogs through all the frustrations of work—the ledgers, the emails, the way his computer always blue-screens if some idiot IT newbie fucks up and settles his ancient desktop too close to the Storage Area wall. The day winds to its end. Shougo leaves the office to run one last quick sweep of Storage before he heads out, and Kurogane cannot wait for him to finally leave. He has another book he needs to look into—one of the nastier ones.

“Kurogane?” his coworker calls, and Kurogane startles, staring around the empty room with suspicion. He _just_ saw Shougo exit through the Storage door, but the man sounds like he’s right there.

….because he _is_.

Kurogane picks his head up off his desk and tries to pretend he wasn’t just out cold, face down on a stack of unfinished requisition requests that need submitting to Finance by this afternoon. “Were you _sleeping_?” Shougo asks, incredulous.

He doesn’t answer. He _cannot_ answer. Dreams glut themselves on monotony and nightmares haunt his every waking moment. He thinks he is losing his mind. (He thinks he has already lost it.)

“ _Fight back, little boy_.” At least this time he can tell that the creature that warps and writhes and dances beyond the edge of his knife cannot possibly exist in the waking world. It looks a little like the thing the mirror showed him, a figure cloaked in nothing but the ravages of violence, tall and grinning with a blood-smeared mouth. Without the extra heads or with fewer arms it would match that vision exactly.

The monster laughs with all three throats, its voices weaving into the triumphant swell of the Song. Its many hands seem to move independently—some carry all manner of weapons, all ready to bring Kurogane down. Some seem to beg for mercy, or flail uselessly with terror.

One pair carries a simple pipe, which it raises to a ragged, lipless mouth and begins to play.

 _Down_ comes the war hammer. Kurogane twists away from it before it can split his skull, steps under the wild swing of a maul. A spear of some sort whistles past his ear, nearly taking the appendage with it. His body heaves with exhaustion. He doesn’t know how long he has been trapped in this duel or why, but he does not dare to cease the dance.

 _“Fight me or die like the others,”_ the creature apes the voice of his parents’ killer with sadistic glee, and the battlefield shifts to match. The thing nearly fills the space, a weaving mass of limbs and weapons that should be far too awkward to fit in the modest living room. And yet, the smaller quarters don’t seem to matter—it moves to the whim of the Song and it has no trouble continuing its relentless assault.

It drives Kurogane back to the console table with a clawed lunge. He throws himself hard to the left as a morningstar slams into the sofa in a hail of fluff and splintering frame. The creature is toying with him—some of those arms hold pistols, and Kurogane knows at short range he would not survive. It enjoys this too much—playing at his memories and forcing him into corners—always with that _fucking_ grin on its face(s).

He wants to cut it off.

“Fuck off.” He hisses, ducking into the next _whack_ of a machete, and carving a line of red over cracking skin. Blood-stained teeth grin wider, sharper, and the chorus of battle surges like a tide.

They tangle and the world melts, reforms, flickers through too many times and places to keep track as they clash to the rhythm of the piper’s tune. Duck and cut and stab and slash and Listen to the Song. Fury lights Kurogane’s bones and blinds him to the pain of injury and the wear of exhaustion.

Out flashes the knife. The pipes shriek. The drumroll booms. He dances away from a poleaxe and feels a greatsword dig into the meat of his thigh. None of it matters—he only has to keep himself whole enough to keep moving. The Song will do the rest.

He used to dream of peace once—used to think he could escape. He knows better now. He belongs to the War. He can hear it in his speeding heartbeat—in the creature’s laughter and the gurgle of dying breath as he crushes its first throat in his hand. He can feel it in the rush of victory and the barest instant of fear in the creature’s eyes as he slams the knife home in its impossible, battle-scarred chest and _twist_ s—)

He wakes up with blood on his teeth and the knife in his hand and wonders what would happen if he set it to his own throat and drove the pommel up.

* * *

“Mr. Black?” That ridiculous name lassos Kurogane back from the brink of unconsciousness. He drags his head up and away from his arms on the table, opening one eye just enough to stare the speaker down. One of Fai’s co-workers, a younger girl he doesn’t see as often, blinks down at him through thick, round glasses. “I… you ordered a coffee?”

Right.

“Yeah,” he croaks. His throat feels like sandpaper given the events of…. Last night? He doesn’t even know. He’s pretty sure it’s Saturday morning now.

His attempt to use the Lepidopterarium went about as badly as it possibly could. Who knew a fucking butterfly house could have trapped him in a hellscape of its own making when so many other more obvious artifacts had failed? Might have been worth it if he could have abandoned the knife, but…

_The artifact didn’t look like much—just white insect netting over a white metal frame. A small, flowering potato plant grew inside that inexplicably never seemed to die, even without any kind of sunlight or care. He hadn’t known what to expect when he’d pulled the front netting aside, but he’d had to fight against himself to do it. Desperately, he’d taken that for a sign… maybe this would finally work._

_Freed from the netting, the first moth leapt, chirping, from its prison. A second followed, then a third—a hundredth—an endless wave of swirling, flapping insect bodies swarming in a murmuration that slowly grew to cloak the whole damn room. He doesn’t know when they made the switch, but at some point he’d looked past the endless sea of squirming thoraxes and fluttering wings and realized he could no longer recognize the landscape beneath them._

_The moths surged and crawled over his skin, fucking chirping_ _without end. He never has been too frightened of insects, but even so… when they started trying to crawl into his mouth and ears, he’d drawn a line. Out flashed the knife, severing limbs and wings for hours until the damn things got the picture and left him enough space to breathe. He’d started wandering, started making his peace with the idea that maybe he’d found an ending without an exit. All around him, moths swarmed, gorging themselves on giant, mottled leaves and chirping in such masses he couldn’t have heard the Song if it took him on the spot._

_He doesn’t know how long he’d walked before he found the Lepidopterarium’s previous victim._

_Whoever they had been, time and the delicate tongues of moths had long-eaten any identity from their bones. Features, flesh, organs… but not life. Whatever rules guarded that place, they did not allow it to die._

_The skeleton stood and regarded him, swarmed by moths crawling in and out of its empty sockets, still pupating cocoons clinging to its ribcage and pulsing like mockeries of the heart they must have eaten. Kurogane watched warily back—recognized something familiar in the helpless slump of bony shoulders and the tremor of bleach-white hands. This… this was someone trapped by their terror. A person literally consumed by the things they fear most._

_It knelt and bared its empty neck, voicelessly begging for death as the moths’ chirping rose to a screeching crescendo. Perhaps this place never intended its victims to find the release of eternal rest, but Kurogane serves a different master—one that urges him to bring all to the Slaughter._

_He could do it, but he does not fear the moths enough to take the creature’s place. The realm would spit him out. He’d have to keep the knife…_

Kurogane makes a valiant effort to pull himself upright and pretend he’s a functioning human being. Every inch of him aches with sheer exhaustion and he can’t stop hallucinating the feeling of fucking _moth wings_ on his skin. He leaves the girl enough space to set a cup down, head propped up on one arm. She stares, big green eyes wide. “…Something wrong?”

“No! No, sorry.” She settles the cup within reach and he grasps for it immediately, glaring at the fall leaves printed over the thing’s paper surface. Time keeps passing, faster for every failed attempt at escaping the Song and he feels more and more that he has nothing to show for it. “I just… well, you come here a lot, Mr. Black and we’re all pretty fond of you. But today, you look… are you okay?”

He takes a moment to consider the question. The girl is barely better than a stranger. He doesn’t even know her name—has to force his vision to focus long enough to read, “Fuu” printed on her nametag. He doesn’t see why she should give a shit, but he supposes he must look fairly worrisome, near to passed out at a café table like a drunkard in yesterday’s clothes.

Kurogane flicks the plastic lid off the café cup with his free hand, lifts it to his mouth and takes a long swallow. It burns its way down his throat, far too hot to drink, but his inhuman nature takes care of the damage faster than he can injure himself. At least it stops the imagined sensation of insects crawling into his mouth. The cup settles back on the table with a quiet _tap_ that echoes through the threat of the Song and starts to set an unsteady rhythm.

“Nope.” Kurogane emphasizes the “ _p_ ” and tries not to let his irritation with his own life cloud his treatment of the poor girl worrying over him.

“Oh. I’m… Is there someone I can call for you?” He wants to laugh at the question, because who is he supposed to call? ( ~~He wishes he could ask for Fai.~~ ) He thinks of the skeleton, kept alive by the very things it wants to escape, trapped in its worst nightmare. He does not have to wonder how it feels.

“No.” He pulls himself to his feet, trying to ignore the music building in the back of his thoughts. He doesn’t have the energy to head home just yet, but he doesn’t need to sit here and frighten the poor staff longer. “Don’t worry about me, kid. I can take care of myself.”

“If you say so.” She murmurs. Her fingers twist at the hem of her apron as she watches him drink still too-hot coffee and start to step for the door.

* * *

_“Oh, it has you bad, doesn’t it?” Blue eyes search his face for something Kurogane doesn’t understand. Fai’s thin hand shifts beneath his own to brush a sopping, stray hair behind his ear._

_He cannot answer, so he simply watches. His mind feels blessedly blank, no messy thoughts to muddy the music of the Song that plays quiet and slow through the clouded night. Each note rings soothing through the patter of rain, ( ~~he misses Fai more than he knew it was possible to miss anyone,~~ ) and he has nowhere else to be. _

_“Honestly,” Fai sighs, hand drifting down to cradle the angle of Kurogane’s jaw. “I am a horrible choice for an anchor. You have awful taste.” The rising notes of hope twist against the painful ache of sadness in a beautiful duet. Fai gives him every chance to turn away, telegraphs each movement as he takes a final step into Kurogane’s space. His other hand slides to rest against Kurogane’s shoulder blade and he—_

_The Song doesn’t urge him to protest, but he thinks he would fight if it did. His heart beats, terrified and desperate as Fai presses a kiss like a prayer to the seam of Kurogane’s lips._

_He thinks again of starlight and the endless horizon—the warmth of Fai and the weight of all the things he never said. Memories flood his mind like the tide and he shutters, hand falling to brace himself against Fai’s shoulder. “There you are.” Whispers in the dark, words spoken into the corner of his mouth._

_Music surges, a crescendo of triumph, and… starts to fade away._

_Kurogane blinks through the haze of confusion. He watches the world solidify. Rain falls, and he can actually feel the cold biting at his skin. His legs ache, body heavy. The distant sound of a car passing echoes down an alley to the courtyard. It all sounds so strange on the other side of the Song._

_“Fai?” he dares to ask, worried that the dream might change and take his fantasy away. The object of his attention simply chuckles and pulls backwards just enough to hold Kurogane’s gaze._

_“So they say.” His sunshine hair is just as soaked as the rest of him, nearly silver in the strange glow of blue light, a little longer than Kurogane saw it last. The bags beneath his eyes make him look nearly as tired as Kurogane feels. “Didn’t I tell you not to look for me?”_

_“Not like I can help where the dreams go,” he grumbles, indulging in the sensation of contact. Fai’s touch trails from his jaw to comb through messy, dark hair. He has missed this so deeply he can scarcely breathe—missed it despite the fact he never had it in the first place. _

_“Kurogane…” Fai tugs, makes sure Kurogane can look him in the eyes as he talks. Everything feels so… heavy. His eyes flutter. He tries to keep his gaze pinned to Fai, but—“_ Did you really think you were dreaming?”

Kurogane jerks awake, nearly busting his head against the solid shape of his own front door. What had just—what just happened? Frigid rainwater drenches his clothes completely through. He finds himself sitting in a puddle of it, leaned against a wall and dripping onto the entryway.

He… he must have walked home in the rain and passed out, right? He wouldn’t dare to hope that maybe…

The warmth of Fai’s touch lingers in his thoughts, such a clear memory that he can’t keep himself from believing…He must be imagining things, but when he licks his drying lips he tastes the slightest hint of vodka and something faint he can’t name, like ozone.


	8. Presto

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Presto -  
> MUSIC:  
> a movement or passage marked to be performed in a quick tempo. Often the final movement of a Sonata. 
> 
> EXCLAMATION:  
> a phrase announcing the successful completion of a trick, or suggesting that something has been done so easily that it seems to be magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just one more after this! Chapter 9 might be a little short (we'll see)   
> It's so nice to see this coming to an end! I hope people have enjoyed.

* * *

He doesn’t hate his job. Not even now, despite the growing litany of scars on his body and his mind as time after time his attempts to shake the fate that awaits him result in nothing but failure. He thinks… he _knows_ the Song would still have taken him regardless of whether he worked in Artifact Storage. Its hooks had found him long before—on a red-stained summer evening in an otherwise normal, suburban house.

In many ways, he owes the Institute, honestly. Without access to the artifacts, he would have given up hope long ago. He probably would have rushed to a very different end, too frightened of becoming something he hates. And now, at the end of his rope, it gives him a different kind of out.

Kurogane hates the thought of giving up. His every instinct screams at him to double down and _fight_ to rip what he wants from the world, but perhaps that only adds to the problem. He wants to tear himself away from something that only grows stronger the harder he struggles against it. Fear and anger only feed it, but he can’t stop feeling angry and afraid every second he spends trying to leave it behind. Maybe if Fai hadn’t left, things would be different, but…

He can’t tell any longer—the difference between reality and dreams. And he worries that someday soon, he’ll wake from another violent nightmare to find the knife slick with innocent blood and no idea who he’s killed. He can’t control this. He knows better now. He needs to accept that.

Suicide sounds like a better and better end from day to day, but he wonders whether anything could even kill him at this point—whether he might come back worse if it succeeded. Once again, he rests all his hopes on Artifact Storage. At this point, he knows the lurking monsters and hidden dangers there perhaps better than anyone else alive, and the place is _meant_ to house supernatural horrors. He can just… stay there—locked in, filing paperwork and sating his bloodlust with the shit that goes too far.

He doesn’t even think his boss will fight him on the idea. He wouldn’t really need any extra accommodation; a few days ago, Kurogane realized he no longer needs to eat physical food. He assumes the need to sleep will swiftly follow. (A possible mercy, except that his dreams have started taking him awake.) He can’t see an objection from a moral standpoint that holds any water either. With the Song addling his thoughts, he doesn’t know what would separate him from something like the wax figurine. It could talk. It had clearly had some semblance of intelligence—it had stayed bound in its webbed design for years within its glass case, and he thinks the boss had known the truth of it the whole time.

Sure, living as a Storage cryptid would suck, but… far better than the only alternatives he can see. Besides, if there are more things like the poor soul trapped in the Lepidopterarium buried in that collection… maybe his ability to kill literally anything can still do some kind of good.

He figures out what it would take to arrange his affairs, and writes a letter to Sonomi. She did a lot more for him than he ever properly appreciated. He feels too unstable to visit the only foster family he ever considered actually worthy of the title, but he can at least admit to himself that he misses them.

Funny how endings bring what really matters into context. He wishes he’d visited them more, and work be damned, but… then again, if he’d brought anything home with him he could never forgive himself. So he writes, taking advantage of the few moments where his head stays clear and he can’t hear any errant strains of music. Stupid, that it feels so much like a suicide note. But he supposes it is, in a way.

Kurogane has never known when to give up, but he has no energy left to give, no hope, and this morning he’d woken up with a new kind of hunger burning in his veins. Whatever he becomes, at least if he locks himself up he might take some tiny measure of victory in denying the War the senseless slaughter it wants. And if his boss won’t accommodate the request… then he’ll worry about testing his other options.

The knife chimes a sour note of reprimand when he slips it into his pocket, but Kurogane really doesn’t care for its opinion.

“Get over it,” he growls, voice rough from disuse and dreaming battle cries. He picks up his wallet and the letter both, turns the key in the door, and steps out into the brisk air of a dim autumn morning.

He feels more and more certain of his decision as the commute drags on. Every stray noise threatens to morph into a rhythm, every accidental brush of his person banks the fires of anger burning in his thoughts. He keeps his hands clenched tight until they ache with the tension, every bit of him taught with the urge to rip out the throat of the next person who so much as looks at him sideways. He climbs out of the Sloan Square underground entrance with the Song battering at his mind in desperate need of some peace and _fucking_ quiet.

…or at least a cup of coffee.

One last cup of coffee. He can grant himself that, right? If his plan succeeds, he can probably bully Shougo into grabbing some for him any other time, but it just won’t feel the same. And if his plan fails…

He crosses the street and starts to head for the Cat’s Eye Café

* * *

If he’s going to make this his last hurrah, he’d better indulge a little. Technically, he needs to grab the drink and run if he wants to make it to work on time, but he really couldn’t care less about punctuality at this point. He orders a cup from the new hire at the front, a tall bloke with a sharp gaze and dark hair that falls into his eyes. Kurogane grabs it the moment it comes off the line, and wades through the morning crowd to sit at the same damn table near the door.

He can’t help but think of the first time he’d decided to sit here, waiting around for Fai to show up. Was that only last spring? The days seem to drag so long lately; it feels much further away than that.

The cup between his hands radiates heat, too much for any normal person to drink. He could down it without consequence if he wanted to, but he’d rather take his time. He has to hold his right leg a little awkwardly in the chair to avoid taking the knife from his pocket, but he sets his other personal effects out on the table’s surface to wait.

The petty frustrations and annoyances of other customers pushing through the line and their own lives settle in the back of Kurogane’s awareness like white noise as he stares out at the light of early morning. All the greenery on the walk over has given way to the shades of fall, and something about the angle of the sun speaks to him of approaching cold. If he tries, he can sense the swell of deeper anger hidden among those passing by—road rage, the righteous fury of someone betrayed, dispassionate frustration that has burned so low and so long it has turned to ice. (He does not want to try)

Kurogane waits for the cup to feel almost cool enough to drink and tries to ignore the itch beneath his skin that urges him to get up, follow the brightest of those passions, and encourage them to violence.

Did Fai ever feel this way? He can’t help the thought as it escapes him. Did he start to recognize strange new senses and new instincts, more frightened for every addition? Did he try to justify them to himself? He wonders where Fai is now—( ~~whether that dream actually happened~~ ), whether he’ll return to find Kurogane gone, whether he will even care at all.

As if Summoned by the thought, the distant Song tugs at him. It sounds a lone, high violin on the far horizon, each note bowed slow.

“Don’t even fucking start,” he murmurs to it, and shuts himself up with coffee. He’s not in the mood for any kind of games.

“Oh! Mr. Black! I was hoping we’d see you today.” Oruha swings in from the front door and spots him immediately. Her curly hair ruffles in the breeze as she steps through the threshold, wild and down. Without her apron she gives off an even more elegant air than usual.

He manages something like a smile at the sight of her. He has grown fond of the staff here, if he allows himself any kind of honesty. And her strange and persistent worry for him over the past couple of months has been one of the only humanizing connections he’s managed to maintain. 

But then she adds, “Did Fai find you yet?”

…

He has to take a moment to process that question.

“What did you just say?”

“I’ll take that as a no!” Oruha laughs. She tugs her coat free and starts tying her hair up as she talks, “Odd—he said he planned to find you this morning, but if you hang around I bet you could catch him before the afternoon shift,” she winks.

Kurogane’s mind blanks. Somewhere, not too far away, he hears the notes of a lone violin pick up speed. The shrieking pipes of battle rise beneath it and herald the tide of violence. 

Can he trust this? He thinks he understands Oruha well enough, but perhaps not. She could have some kind of plot in place, in league with the War. What if she simply means to lure him into the final trap? (What if he has his hopes up for nothing? What if he wakes up face down on his keyboard and realizes none of this ever really happened at all?) He really can’t afford that.

But the sound on the wind plays on, insistent, and the air of the Café _had_ seemed a little strangely spacious despite the crowd this morning. The memory of a kiss in the rain lingers on his skin and he thinks…

“Are you alright? You look a little pale.”

It could finally break him if he chases that sound down and discovers this all for a farce. Could finally shatter the thin veneer of his control and send him spiraling, without care into the arms of the Slaughter. But if he stays and the Song doesn’t lie—if Fai intended to return and found himself waylaid by a fight—

The possibility leaves him no choice at all.

“Wait! You forgot your—” Oruha’s shout chases him into the street, but he doesn’t have time to listen. He focuses as much as he dares on the Song and follows the tune of the Piper as surely as a rat led off to drown.

* * *

Though few traditional land battles ever touched its soil, the War certainly has no lack of spaces to dwell in London. The city bears its Blitz scars proudly in nearly every ward, and the history of overseas conflict and empire building waged from its center trails long.

Kurogane doesn’t expect the song of the fight he follows to send him toward the Royal Hospital Chelsea as he races through populated streets and garners the stares of passers-by, but he also doesn’t find himself surprised when the trail leads that way. The place has served as a veteran’s home since the 1600’s, and the portion of it that sprawls to the West saw plenty of violence when bombs hit and destroyed the Infirmary there in 1941.

These days, Royal Hospital Chelsea has reorganized to place its Infirmary further east, but the western section remains, rebuilt and re-designated as The National Army Museum.

So, no. When the music surges at the Museum’s front step Kurogane does not find himself at all surprised. He _does_ find himself stymied, however. He knows the music leads here—he can still hear it, but it sounds. Muffled? Stuck behind something. Not the building’s façade or the distance of a basement. He knows the fight should play out right _here_ he just can’t… see it…

Fucking hell. Absolutely not. He refuses to wait, trapped on the other side of the veil again. He’s spent the last two months, _at least_ , looking for a way to reach liminal spaces like Fai’s version of the Tower Bridge. Maybe Fai’s Titan or whatever can keep him from reaching the Fall, but like _fuck_ is he going to let something like reality keep him from the Slaughter’s domain. If it wants so badly for him to use this fancy new power set, it can give him the ability to shift worlds, _or it can take a fucking hike_.

As his anger builds, so too does the volume of the Song. He doesn’t care. He paces near the entrance, rage a living creature in his chest, breath hot enough to cast grey plumes of condensation in the chill air. It wants him to feed it? Well here he fucking is, and _if it knows what’s good for it_ —

He feels it this time—knows the precise instant he steps from one domain to the next. His existence cuts itself from reality to the Infirmary in a jagged slash and Kurogane steps through the wound. He doesn’t look back.

The National Army Museum flashes once, twice, in his mind’s eye, and flickers out like a guttered flame to reveal the Infirmary beneath. To call it a building of any sort would grant it too much credit—its once whole frame has weathered one too many blasts, and the jagged remains of stone and structure decorate the landscape like the pointed teeth of an alien beast. The sky burns red with smoke and ash, a color that bleeds into the earth and paints the scarred ground in swaths of rust. On the distant horizon, the skyline casts an unfamiliar silhouette. Each whole building stands defiant and strange—an echo of a foreign land. And over every alcove and soot-blasted inch of lifeless ground the Piper’s tune surges like a tidal wave of sound. 

“ _Stand still, little Fly_ ,” the beast of many arms dominates the landscape, though Kurogane notes with some satisfaction that it seems a few limbs down since his last dream. Its many weapons rattle and sway, all pointed toward the same quarry. At its feet, darting between the falling blows and only just narrowly avoiding the bite of blades, Kurogane spots a flash of blond.

_Fai._

“Hardly a fit feast for your type if I don’t put up much of a fight is it? Honestly, you should be thanking me.” He twists away from the tip of a bayonet with unnatural grace, stupid grin plastered on his face. Minor wounds already mar his usually flawless appearance, nicks and cuts that scatter over bared arms and his _idiot_ face.

“ _Thank you? For fleeing every blow like a coward?_ ”

“Well, if we fight _here_ , I don’t have a lot of options. What say you look me in the eye and we even these odds a little more?” Fai is _teasing it_ , he realizes belatedly, watching as it responds to the bait. The pipes wail in annoyance, countermanded by the staccato dance of violin.

Kurogane has never wanted so badly before to deck someone and kiss them in the same moment. He glances between combatants, mind struggling to do the math. Fai doesn’t look exhausted yet, but he doesn’t seem to have anything by way of offense up his sleeve, and Kurogane knows firsthand how hard this particular monstrosity can fight. He takes a moment to himself, just one last second to make sure… and then, fully-cognizant and with every intention of using it, he pulls the knife free.

“Hey, asshole!” His graveled voice carries strangely over the blast zone, booming loud as the song. “We’ve got unfinished business.”

“ _You_ ,” the creature rasps at the same time Fai murmurs,

“Kurogane…?”

He intended to distract the beast. He did not intend to distract _Fai,_ but unfortunately he manages both. One of the enemy’s many limbs swings down and out with a blackjack, catching Fai with a heavy blow that connects with an audible _crack._ Fai flies through the air with the force of it, gaze wide with surprise as it carries him like a human projectile in Kurogane’s direction.

“ _Shit_ ,” he curses, turning the knife aside just in time to avoid stabbing Fai with it as he catches the blonde’s limp form.

The creature that hunts them both follows after, step by step, deliberate and slow.

“Well,” Fai chokes, all the air successfully knocked from his chest. “This isn’t exactly how I pictured meeting you today, but I can’t say I’m complaining.” He has to fight to force the words free. Eldritch creature or no, a blow like that must have taken its due in broken ribs.

He looks tired—hair a little longer, just like that rainy dream and Kurogane thinks… he _knows_ it must have actually happened by now. The lack of sleep written over Fai’s face and the pallor of injury both draw a pang of worry from the remains of Kurogane’s heart, but he doesn’t have time to entertain it. He wants to berate Fai for leaving and demand to know _why._ He wants to kiss Fai senseless/He wants to drop Fai on his ass.

The pipes drone a low note of warning, drums of war rolling. He can’t afford to wrestle with his own awe/annoyance/concern right now. Kurogane holds Fai’s form as steady as he can and keeps his gaze pinned to the approaching enemy.

“Did you have some kind of plan?”

“So far, the plan was, ‘don’t die,’” Fai wheezes with every breath. They have to get him out of here and either to A&E, or someone with a really poignant fear of heights. (If Fai dies before he even bothers to explain himself, Kurogane will find him in the afterlife and punch him so _hard._ )

“Can you pull that scaffolding trick and get us out of here?”

“No—not until it’s defeated.”

Kurogane meets blood-shot eyes over the battlefield. He knows what he needs to do. The knife in his hand hums with anticipation, and in the orange light he sees the enemy’s red-stained mouths split with the same horrid grin. One pair of hands lifts the pipe to the ragged rent of its third face and it begins to play a marching tune that resonates with the wail of air sirens and the distant sound of impacts to call the Song anew.

Earlier today, he’d decided to lock himself in fucking Storage, rather than give in to the glory of the Song in full. He had known he would fall to it eventually otherwise. Suddenly, with Fai on the line, he can’t make the same choice.

Kurogane sets his jaw, veins itching to join in the dance. He places Fai on a nearby mound of rubble as carefully as he can without taking his eyes away from the ever-nearing beast.

“I’ll defeat it. I just need one thing from you,”

“Sure. Anything. Give me—give me a few seconds and I can do it.” Fai gasps, resettling in his throne of shattered concrete. The enemy laughs, only a few strides away now. It pauses its forward march to pace, turning the arena and gauging Kurogane on the other side. Too many arms shiver with anticipation, sabers rattling and pipe-song entreating Kurogane to leave his sense behind and fall into the Rhythm.

“Promise me, if you can’t bring me back out of the Song this time, you’ll leave me right the fuck here.” He feels Fai’s gaze on his neck. More than that, he hears the key shift of violins. Long, sweet notes that drag themselves anew beneath the clarion call.

“No.” He can’t afford that answer. Kurogane growls, flipping the knife between his fingers in irritation.

“I _need_ you to promise—”

“I _promise_ I’ll bring you back,” Fai insists. His cold hand finds Kurogane’s right wrist and he squeezes firmly, stilling the path of the knife through the air. Already, Kurogane has to struggle not to reach back and elbow him in the face for the touch. “I won’t let you hurt anyone that doesn’t deserve it.”

“ _Touching.”_ The beast fires one of its pistols at the space near Fai’s knee, and they both jump. “ _Don’t worry little Soldier, I’ll leave you just alive enough to watch as I take the Titan’s creature apart, limb from limb._ ”

Kurogane can’t exact the promise he wants, but he doesn’t have the time to convince Fai further. He pulls away from the delicate touch at his wrist, trying to ignore the way Fai traces the starburst scar on the back of his hand as he lets go. With music wailing in his ears and the knife eager for blood, Kurogane takes a deep breath and begins to _listen_.

He’d like to pretend the idea that he might have just traded many innocent lives for Fai’s doesn’t occur to him in that moment, but he doesn’t need to lie to himself. He knows the choice he makes, and he makes it anyway.

* * *

_Every petty schoolyard brawl, every twisted nightmare, every tangle with the creatures lurking in the Institute’s shadowed corners only ever led up to this moment and this fight._

_In the swell of the song, Kurogane feels powerful enough to take on the creature that Violence sees fit to pit against him. He could take on multitudes—he understands it now, the song of the knife and the shape of his own strength—the way the music guides his hand and bolsters his form to weather the enemy’s strikes._

_Duck and cut and twist and lunge—the arms that weave their piping spell all seek to bring him to his end, but the Song keeps him moving, keeps his head firmly threaded to his shoulders and heals all but the worst of the rest. He bends beneath the fall of a battle axe and drives his empty hand towards an unprotected eye. The knife, he swings forward in a wild arc, catching the edge of paper-thin flesh. The creature cries out, voice joining the Song. It slams the haft of a halberd into the trunk of his waist and follows through with its edge. Red flows over Kurogane’s side in a torrent, the sacrifice of just a moment before the haze of rage floods in and the cut seals._

_On and on, the pipes drive the dance to a fever pitch. They match each other and move to a rhythm, but make no feign at elegance. Brutality rules their every move—an answer to the siren call to gouge and rip and tear._

_The blade he picked up so many years ago hums its own truths as he lets it bite the blood of a hated foe. It is his now, a part of him. It never could have fit like this in any other hand—not the killer who delivered it, not the well-meaning detective who hid it away, not the opportunist or the pawn broker or any of the other grimy grasps that pawed at it on the shelf before Kurogane arrived. It had formed itself to the shape of his rage on that fateful night so many years ago and refused all other wielders. Now he rewards it, and with each satisfying slash its form begins to shift. _

_The song heals the monster’s wounds, just as it heals Kurogane. Left to their own devices they might clash, evenly matched, for the rest of time. (_ He can’t afford that. Fai is still here, waiting and trying to quiet himself in the Song, though the violins jump an octave with worry every time Kurogane takes a needless blow—Fai still needs help. There has to be a way to—) _But the knife becomes a sword in his grip, longer for every drop of red until its transformation finally completes. He holds a fearsome katana now, and though he did not keep up with his kendo training, he knows exactly how to use it._

_Kurogane understands without knowing how that the song cannot grow back entire limbs._

_He takes a spiked mace to the shoulder that grinds his bones together and spends the opportunity to lop the creature’s offending arm free. The manic grin that works its way over his expression no longer looks human, eyes open wide and face coated in blood._

_“I knew you could be perfect without the Titan’s influence,” the thing laughs, even as Kurogane takes another of its hands._

_“Shut the fuck up,” he rasps, voice a ruin to match its own. The Song simply wallows in the glory of the fight but Kurogane wants an ending. He changes the angle of his sword and aspires to take a cackling head, earning a short sword slash to his hip for the trouble. He feels steel near his quarry by inches, hears the difference in the tempo of the Song. Pipes rise and start to trill at a furious speed, buoyed on the tide of its anger. _

_With a sour note of displeasure, it spins a pistol and fires. Kurogane moves far faster with the Song behind him than he ever has before, but even so, he cannot dodge live rounds. The creature aims true enough and blunted metal digs deep into Kurogane’s chest._

_Behind the melody, he hears violins strike a terrified refrain, feels the way that fear feeds him. (_ Fai is frightened for him, not of him, but the War does not seem to mind the difference. He needs to end this faster.) _Every wound stings, screams its pain into Kurogane’s mind. But though the War demands that he experience each new tear for every second of its proper agony, no pain will slow him. Kurogane_ _grits his teeth against the hurt and brings the sword back up just in time to block a rain of weapons, too numerous to bother identifying. A strange, metal sound joins the Music as his too-quickly healing body rejects the bullet and sends it rolling at their feet._

_The pace of battle picks back up, no time for words outside the language of violence as they trade blows. The trail of fallen limbs and the rivulets of blood they leave behind as they travel paint a terrible scene. By all accounts they make an even match, but as steel meets steel and wood and iron and bone, Kurogane starts to see it—the differences that separate him from this wretched thing. They both burn with the same unholy rage on the whim of the same insistent will. They both fight with the same animalistic fervor. Violence has no favorite children and lends no inherent advantage to one or the other. War is fickle and prone to obey the whim of fortune. But. _

_The creature towering before Kurogane has committed one fatal sin. It has started to feel itself safe. _

_Once he listens long enough, he knows exactly what to do. Kurogane waits, leaves an opening for a stabbing lunge he knows the thing will not be able to resist, and swings his sword high. The force of his slash carries through the air on a wave of the Song and cleaves the creature’s pipe cleanly in two._

_Pianissimo, the music falls, and the piping face stares at its broken tool in open disbelief. Its ruined mouth gapes. Low drums beat even and slow, then faster, louder, until the creature shrieks with rage._

_“YOU!” It thunders, but Kurogane simply takes a step back and watches. Its extra faces and arms shudder and crack. Beneath his gaze, the skin blackens, turns to ash and begins to fleck away, backed by the chorus of the creature’s screams._

_He watches extra limbs and faces slough away and turns the katana between his fingers, letting the trail of blood that travels over his arm from likely-healed wounds coat the hilt. The pitiful creature breaks down to its most base form, all the extra power it stole fluttering away like so much incendiary ash. If he cuts into the core of the thing while it cannot stop him, will it make a better sound? The one that echoes now annoys him—tinny and off key._

“Time to go, I think,” _the voice that matches the violins speaks, too close, and Kurogane whirls, ready for the next round. He feels a gentle touch against the scar of his right hand on the sword hilt for just a second before he meets that Blue gaze. Strange eyes flash, world cycling first to a towering scaffold where it hurts-hurts-hurts to exist, then the dull brown brick of a narrow alley. _

_He stumbles back and jerks his hand free, holding the katana between himself and the fragment of Deep Blue. The Song fights its own battle in his ears over how to proceed. He should gut the man for daring to touch him—_ (He will kill himself before it forces him to do such a thing.)

“Alright now. Easy does it. That’s quite the spell it works on you,” _he watches the blond approach, keeps the blade at the ready. The Song demands blood, but when he tries to obey and free the man’s head from his neck, his every muscle locks in place._ (No. Absolutely not.)

 _The Fragment—_ (Fai. His name is Fai.)— _steps forward slowly with his hands up, like someone calming a frightened animal. “_ I’m going to take this out of your hand, okay?” _Thin fingers find his wrist again. The Song flares with buzzing warning, blade trilling a furious protest, but he cannot force himself to move. The Fragment—Fai—pries the weapon from his stiff fingers, watching it curiously as it shrinks back down to its original shape._

 _“Don’t—don’t—” Kurogane stammers, though he does not know the shape of the words he means to say. (_ Don’t just stand there—don’t let me near you—please, if any god at all exists, don’t let me hurt him—Kurogane’s thoughts run a dual litany he can barely comprehend. His head aches even worse than the rest of him, and he thinks if he focuses he can feel the wet trail of blood leaking at his ears.)

“I know,” _Fai soothes. He keeps the knife, holding it behind his back with one hand. With the other, he reaches out to Kurogane, nerves firm as steel, every motion made at a glacial pace._ “I know it hurts—You really let it sweep you under.”

(I didn’t have a choice, he wants to grouch, but the rest of him simply wants to scream profanity in Fai’s face and the net result renders him voiceless.) _Fai’s touch starts at the ragged edges of his torn clothes. He sweeps his fingers over the scarred and healing skin beneath—trailing from the gash at Kurogane’s side to the gunpowder burn at his chest. He struggles against the phantom force that holds him still, driven by the protests of the knife and the frustrations of the Song, until—until…_

“Wouldn’t do to bring you back only for you to collapse from an injury, right Kuro-grumpy?” _He explains, patting at the deep bruise that hasn’t quite fled from Kurogane’s shoulder yet. And that’s a strange name. Is that supposed to be Kurogane’s name? Why does he feel so glad to hear it?_

_The soothing sound of Fai’s violin breaks over the din of all else like sunlight at dawn. He doesn’t—He doesn’t—_

_He doesn’t want to hurt Fai?_

(He does not want that—not in any way that matters. He has missed Fai so deeply these past months he does not have enough words to express the feeling.)

“ _I,” he starts, brow furrowed with confusion._

“I’ve got it from here, okay?” _Fai murmurs, fingers finally rising to comb through the shorter hair at the nape of Kurogane’s neck._ “You were amazing, but you have to walk it back now.” _Somehow between the gentle touch of Fai’s hand and the easy comfort of his presence, the Song starts to lose its hold. And when Fai kisses the line of his jaw, he—_

Fai is already positioned to catch him when he falls forward, shivering as the Song crawls out of his head. Exhaustion fills the gap it leaves behind. He aches _everywhere_ —too much of him injured and re-formed in too short a time.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Fai jokes. And Kurogane cannot help himself.

He doesn’t care about the protests of his own body or the worrying way his ears have begun to ring. Fai went missing on him for _months_. Fai has _no_ sense of self-preservation and Kurogane or the _thing_ they’d just faced could easily have killed him several times over. His hands shake when he clutches the back of Fai’s shirt, but he still has enough energy to press his mouth desperately to Fai’s and try to convey the barest edge of the words he cannot hope to say.

“Kept my promise, didn’t I?” Fai whispers against his lips as they stop to breathe, both of them too worse for wear to maintain the contact for long. Fai’s every inhale still sounds worrisome, and they probably still need to get help for his ribs, but Kurogane’s head still hasn’t quite caught up to those thoughts just yet.

“’m _so_ mad at you—” he slurs and slumps forward to press his face in Fai’s shoulder. Fai laughs. The sound seems to bounce through the narrow brick alley against the cement wall of the National Army Museum. They stand obscured in shadow despite the midday sun, huddled behind a row of unused bike-racks.

“Ah… I guess I deserve some of that.” At least he has the decency to show a little guilt. Kurogane could _strangle_ him—(No. No he absolutely couldn’t.)

“Nothin’ I could do and you _weren’t there._ ”

“I know—I know, I’m sorry.” Fai still has the knife behind his back. Kurogane watches the way he palms the handle, cheek flush with Fai’s shoulder. “I’ll let you yell at me all you want later, okay?” He can hear the strange tension building behind Fai’s voice—through the muted minor key the violins jump to if nothing else.

Why…. Why does Fai hold the knife that way? Does he intend to…?

Paranoia tells him Fai has lured him to a gentle death. He must have determined the same thing Kurogane had earlier today; that he has become too dangerous to leave wandering in the world. Perhaps he walked Kurogane back to save himself a fight and now that he is exhausted and pliant, Fai will take him out before he can do any real harm.

He sees he muscles of Fai’s arm tense, hears an alarm that vibrates through the air, and closes his eyes. If Fai truly believes he needs to go, then—

Fai shoves him to the side and Kurogane falls, expecting at any minute to feel the bite of his own knife. He hears a familiar, wet _thunk_ that pleases the will of violence still tethered to his thoughts and feels… nothing. Not blessed numbness or the lack of sensation brought on by shock, just… nothing happened. He hit his head a little hard against the wall, but his chest is whole. What…?

Confused, he opens his eyes just in time to see Fai, perched atop the snarling figure of the creature that has haunted him in mirrors and shop windows for far too long. Now that he sees the full scope of it, he can tell how closely it resembles the thing he just defeated. Just take away the extra arms and heads, and… Yes, if he squints, he can make out the soot stains that dot the thin skin between its many wounds. It’s the same creature, minus all its fancy tricks. Had it tailed them back out to reality? Had Fai known that it would?

Fai’s hand does not waver on the knife hilt, and his grin is vicious as he stares straight into bloodshot eyes.

“Gotcha.” He chimes, sing-song, and with a flash of blue he drags the creature where Kurogane can’t follow.


	9. The Horizon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They meet at the horizon, a common ground between two planes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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* * *

“Christ. ‘s it nearly Halloween already?” The man standing beside Kurogane blurts as they both wait for the light to change. Kurogane looks a real fright, covered in incendiary ash and drying blood he _really cannot afford to think about too deeply_ _about_ with his clothes shredded to tatters. 

“Yep.” He looks away from the stranger, trying to focus on the horizon and the task ahead, muscle in his jaw jumping. Perhaps he doesn’t look so different from a zombie, though he doesn’t know how this asshole hasn’t smelled the iron on the air yet.

“I swear, the year passes faster every time I blink. That’s a _bang on_ costume though.” Kurogane clenches his empty hands and nods, visibly restraining the part of himself that begs to break the nosy stranger’s neck. If the street weren’t so busy, he’d have j-walked already. He doesn’t have time for this.

Oncoming traffic slows to a stop and he bolts for the other side of the street before the light finishes changing.

“Have fun at your party!” The stranger shouts, and Kurogane grits his teeth. He wishes he had time to step into a public bathroom and rinse off. Or, hell, double back to the Institute and find a change of clothes. Unfortunately, he cannot do either of those things. Because Fai is a self-sacrificial idiot who drags monsters _literally born from Violence_ into one-on-one combat and leaves Kurogane behind.

He might feel better about Fai’s chances if he knew how long the blonde had been missing, but… Fai’s little disappearing act had ripped the knife away with him, and whatever flagging remains of Kurogane’s consciousness remained at that point had promptly gone on holiday.

He still hasn’t properly dealt with the fact that Fai had basically just come back into his life like a fucking tornado, led him straight to the Song, pulled him right back out, and then _left with the knife_. Fai had just… taken it. As if Kurogane hadn’t been futilely trying for months to get rid of it.

(He can still feel it, though the connection to it is just as strained as his sense for Fai’s tune. What a blow that might have been to realize alone—that even if he’d left the knife in some distant realm it would still have kept a piece of him for itself.)

His feet pound on the pavement, nearly overwhelming the distant sound of violin music he can only barely hear. He tries to follow the sound, chasing it with his ear tilted to the wind, trying not to have a constant panic attack at the feel of _so much blood on his skin, and if he loses anyone else to this, he—_

No. He can’t afford to lose it right now. He takes a deep breath and keeps looking.

Strings float on the air, echoing from the furthest heights, muffled by the fabric of the real world. Kurogane follows back across the street and East another block. How he hasn’t had the police called on him yet is anyone’s guess, though he supposes they might have taken him for a party-goer. He doesn’t know how long he spent unconscious. He has no idea where his phone is and no way to check. The sun hasn’t started to set yet, but he doesn’t know what time they’d fallen out of the Infirmary space either.

Another block North. For a heart-stopping moment he nearly loses the trail beneath the noise of nearby construction, but it picks back up again somewhere near Waterloo station. His legs still ache and his brief rest had not been enough to fully recover from such a brutal fight. He chases further and further, into Southwark and down busy central roads. At this rate, he should have taken the fucking tube, but he would have had no way to predict which direction to turn.

Kurogane gathers more than his fair share of stares as he muscles on, but no witty comments and somehow no concerned cops. He tries to pay attention to the flow of the far too distant sound, but he can only just barely hear it, let alone try to decipher the movement of a battle he can’t see.

He’s passing Southwark Cathedral when he hears violin-song waver back into existence, triumphant and exhausted to the east. Fai’s sound surges back into reality as if someone had simply needed to turn the radio dial to bring it into focus, and Kurogane _sprints_ to meet it.

He spots blond hair and the crumpled form of a man at an unused outdoor table at the foot of the Tower Bridge, because of _course_ he does.

“Fai!” he shouts, heedless of the looks he garners for his volume and his general… everything right now. The object of all his hopes and worries doesn’t look at all well, even from this far away. He has his face pressed to the table, one arm clutching at his ribs while the other rests limp in his lap. “Fai,” Kurogane calls again, a little gentler as he stumbles to a halt and reaches out.

The barista shivers strangely, and with a pang of worry Kurogane realizes he is trying to laugh and can’t manage to gather enough air. Fai lets his head loll on the table’s surface until he can see Kurogane’s face, shit-eating grin painted over his expression.

“Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Black,” he wheezes. Flecks of red paint his lips and the colorful array of bruises that map the column of his throat nearly paralyze Kurogane with horror. Fai catches his eye and shivers again, another attempt at laughter that can’t mean anything good. “Hey, you think this is bad, you oughtta see the other guy.”

Kurogane’s thoughts battle for dominance, a mini war inside his head. _What happened? Why did you do that? What’s wrong? How do I fix this? I love you, you complete and total idiot._ So of course, the words that crawl victorious from his mouth are,

“If you die, I will _kill you_ ,”

“ _Fuck,”_ Fai gasps, delirious grin frozen on his bruise-framed face. “Then you better stop making me laugh.”

“Damnit, Fai.” He tears a patio chair out of his way and bends down at Fai’s side. He’s never seen the man this unsteady or uncomposed, and the sight feels _wrong_ somehow. He’s always been the one who falls apart, and he doesn’t know what to _do_. He knows next to nothing about medicine but everything he’s ever seen in popular media tells him not to shift someone with a possibly punctured lung as much as possible. He ducks to meet Fai’s gaze head on instead, practically kneeling at his feet. “Okay—” he starts, only to find that blue eyes have already slipped shut.

“Look at me,” he coaxes, daring to smooth sweat-soaked hair back and away from Fai’s brow. Bright blue finds his own newly-crimson gaze. He waits to feel a fall but… nothing happens. “Fai, you have to throw me in.”

He watches the slow process of that thought as Fai turns it over. The violin plays, slow and quieter with every draw of the bow and really they don’t have _time_. “Come on, we’re right next to the Bridge, right? Just—”

“’doesn’t work if you’re not afraid.” Fai’s expression takes on the hazy look of a man on edge of sleep, and Kurogane has never been more afraid in his life.

“I’m terrified,” he admits, and the truth of it cuts through any lingering embarrassment for the admission. 

“Not of the right thing. Not anymore.” His hands are trembling and he can’t stop trying to put some kind of order to Fai’s hair. Blood rust flecks from his fingers and dirties perfect blond. He can’t— “C’mon Kuro-soldier you know better now, don’t you?” Fai sighs and turns into Kurogane’s touch, uncaring of the stains. No. No he won’t let this happen. He’s not letting Fai go.

“Then I’ll find someone. I’ll… Show me someone afraid. I’ll dangle them off the damn bridge myself.”

“That’s the spirit,” Fai chuckles, but the sound quickly transforms into a worrisome cough that sprays the table with red. Urgency guides Kurogane’s movements and pushes to his feet, scrambling to keep Fai from wracking himself forward and busting his already damaged chest on the edge of the table. He has a feeling if Fai were anything less than himself, he’d be long dead, and that—

“What do you need me to do?”

“Well—” His idiot gasps, grin flecked with blood. Kurogane hangs on his every syllable, ready to sacrifice any of the people passing by to the devil itself if he has to. He waits for Fai to find enough breath to speak. “How do you feel about another date?”

* * *

He means the Shard.

After Kurogane finishes burying the desire to punch Fai in his idiot face for being so blasé about this while he’s _fucking drifting further towards death with every breath_ , Fai explains. In halting sentences and shuddering gasps, he talks about how he’d fed the beast to the Fall and stumbled his way through the Scaffold.

“’was aiming to get to the Shard and I missed.” He whines, head lolling against Kurogane’s shoulder. They garner a lot more suspicious stares now as they walk the short distance from the Tower Bridge back toward the Shard, but he holds hope that they’ll make it into the building before someone tries to call for help.

Kurogane steps as carefully and evenly as he can, trying not to jostle Fai in his arms. The man weighs almost nothing, but this position does still force the muscles of his arms to burn with every second. Still, he couldn’t risk damaging Fai further with any other kind of hold.

If they get stopped, he’ll fight his way out.

“How do you ‘miss’ the tallest building in Western Europe?” Kurogane wears his irritation like a shield, trying to distract himself from the fading tone of violin music.

“Was thinkin’ about you too much. Wound up pulled by the Bridge instead,” Fai answers, matter of fact. Despite everything, Kurogane still feels his face flush at the admission. “Knife wanted to go back to you too. Oh! Your knife!”

Fai starts trying to dig into his pocket, clearly delirious. He can’t force his arm to move the way he wants. It flops uselessly and hangs down toward the pavement instead.

“Knife’s not important. Just—you can hold onto it.” Kurogane grits. And isn’t that a wild thing to say? It’s all he’s focused on since Fai left, but now he really can’t be bothered to care. He steps on, not too much further to go. They can make this. Fai will be okay.

“Hey, I—I wanted you to know, you know, just in case I don’t—”

“Shut up.” Kurogane’s voice rings low and rough. He refuses to entertain the thought that lingers in the air unspoken. “Come on, I can see the door.” He doesn’t know what he plans to do to when he gets through it. He’s never been to the Observation Deck before, but he knows he’ll have to buy some kind of ticket. He imagines the way he looks will probably intimidate anyone intent on commenting if he cuts in front of any tourists, but he can probably afford—

Afford—

Oh no.

“Fai,” he croaks. His gaze flicks down to find the blond’s eyes closed, movement of his chest slowing. “Do _not_ fall asleep on me, asshole. Fai?”

“Hmm?”

“How—” He could figure out another way. He could fight his way to an elevator? Probably. But he doesn’t trust that the police wouldn’t have a way to lock it down. “How much would it take out of you to pull us into the Scaffold right now?”

Fai blinks slowly up at him.

“Not too much, probably? M’more worried about you.”

“Why?”

“It hurt you when we stepped through last time—tried to shake you from the War and it wouldn’t let go.” Fai has to stop and choke for the space of a few precious seconds. “Don’t wanna hurt you again.”

He doesn’t pause to think on that at all. Kurogane already has an answer before Fai draws his next gasping breath.

“Do it.”

“No, I told you I don’t want—”

“You don’t understand. That’s… the Scaffold is our only way up.” Fai’s gaze has long begun to lose focus. His pupils dilate unevenly as he tries to study Kurogane’s face.

“ _Why_.”

“Because,” Kurogane grits, “I forgot my wallet.”

Fai, quite literally, nearly laughs himself to death.

* * *

They make it in the end, though not before the skin of Fai’s face starts to turn faintly blue and Kurogane thinks his heart will leap straight from his chest with fear. He convinces Fai to open the scaffold as soon as he stops driving his own ribs into his lungs with helpless laughter, and they manage not to ‘miss’ the Open Air Observation Deck of the Shard.

Fai shifts the world around them with a flash, and Kurogane steps them both out of the Scaffold close to the interior wall. He decides to keep Fai cradled as gently as he can, and settles in the space beneath a protruding column, facing the milieu of people that gawk at the city below. He’s heard that the Shard tends to garner a pretty sizable crowd, especially as the sun goes down. Looking at the bodies milling close to the glass fences of the walk way beneath the first hint of orange light, he can believe that.

“What do you need me to do?”

“Sit here and be warm,” Fai mumbles. Kurogane feels the air shift around them, the way places usually do when Fai passes through, as if the space between atoms becomes easier to notice. A few of the people closest to the glass begin to shift uneasily.

Minutes pass, Fai starts to look slightly less dead. Eventually, he manages to cross gazes with a young man just a step too far toward the safety wall. Kurogane watches as the stranger stills, then stumbles back, nearly bumping into the family behind him in sudden terror.

“Ow,” Fai whines, one hand clutching at his chest. “I swear _un_ -breaking ribs hurts nearly as much as breaking them in the first place.”

Kurogane wants to contradict him on it, but he actually understands the sentiment. He’s felt the same thing enough times to know.

“Would it help if I stood behind people? Forced them to keep looking?”

“I’d rather you stayed right here.” Fai sighs, leaning back against Kurogane’s chest. Blue flashes again and another poor sap experiences an intense bout of vertigo. The bubbles in Fai’s breath retreat. Kurogane watches and wonders at the sheer relief he feels. He used to worry about artifacts that could pull shit like this—used to think the public needed protection from the kind of things that can feed off fear like emotional vampires, but now…

He wonders whether knowing Fai has changed him, or whether simply having a better understanding of forces beyond control and Becoming has made him care less. He wonders whether it matters.

They sit together in the quiet, watching the sun set. If it weren’t for the sorry state of their clothes or the smell or the quickly dwindling crowd as sight-seers succumb to vertigo at a higher than usual rate, he might forget he wasn’t simply a normal man clinging to the person he loved the most.

Another rib slides into place. Kurogane _hears_ it pop back, and feels Fai’s shiver of pain travel through both of their bones. He loops an arm around Fai’s front, tries to communicate that he’s here without words.

“Thanks.” Fai smiles up at him, already tracing the scars that map the skin over the back of Kurogane’s hand. The white starburst that Marked him first, the faded pink of burns. He glances to the side, and looses a blue flicker in the light of sunset—waits for the distant intake of frightened breath. “Feeling just about good enough to talk now.” The blonde beams.

Kurogane has… so many questions. But he doesn’t know where to start or how to ask. _Why did you go? Where did you go? Why did you come back? Why me?_ He guesses, the one he needs to know the most right now is,

“Are you going to stay?”

“…I want to.” Fai threads his fingers between Kurogane’s, staring down at the way their hands look pressed together. He steels himself with the sight—takes an audible breath before he continues, “are you going to ask why I left?”

“No.” He says, and means it. He wants to know, but Fai clearly doesn’t want to explain. Besides, the bruises slowly fading from Fai’s neck tell a familiar tale, and he begins to think he might know something of the original culprit anyway. “I only care you came back.”

“ _Sap._ ” The blond whines, “ _Kuro-sappy_. Oh my god. You’re going to kill me with talk like that.”

“Don’t joke,” he sighs.

They probably shouldn’t stay out for too long. They’re not exactly inconspicuous, both costumed like zombies with the complexions to match. Neither of them has anything approaching a proper coat for an October night, but Kurogane’s blood runs a little hotter these days, and he’s not ready to let go just yet.

They stay after the last of the orange-red light dies down to the soft glow of the city lights. They stay and talk as Fai forces enough fear to pull himself back together—about Fai’s coworkers and the sorts of creatures Fai’s run into before—the way he knew how to end the beast for good.

They don’t talk about the logic of the things they’ve both become, or the fact that neither of them feels hungry in any normal sense. They don’t talk about the worry that maybe both of them have slid past the point of no return and lost touch with humanity. There are other times and other dark nights for those discussions now.

They sit together, whiling away the time until the voice from the building announces its closing. He thinks he still spots the hint of a bruise on Fai’s collarbone when he squints, but each breath sounds easy and strong. Maybe… _maybe_ , he can trust that Fai will be okay? Maybe he can believe he won’t wake up and learn this was just another cruel fantasy. If something in Storage simply played him for a fool with good dreams, he will spontaneously combust on the _spot_.

Fai catches him looking and smirks.

 _Shit_. He’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be pinned with that fucking look. Kurogane has to glance away.

“So, Mr. Forgot-his-wallet,” the blonde begins, sliding languidly out of Kurogane’s lap and standing in a single, smooth motion.

“I’m not recognizing that nickname.” He stands and dusts his hands against his pants, trying not to gag when the move lifts a cloud of blood dust on the air. Fai squeezes his hand just a little tighter as he gets himself back under control.

“No? Shame. I think it’s one of the more accurate ones.” Fai herds him toward the glass at the far exterior of the viewing area.

“I think I left it at the café. We could go get it if this is your round-about way of asking me for dinner,” he grouses without any real feeling. Fai laughs, and the sound rings clear. Holy hell, he had never before understood how much he could miss the sound of someone’s laugh. It pulls at him—just as captivating as the Song itself.

“Well, it _wasn’t_ , but I’ll keep that one in mind. No I just wanted to know: did you forget your keys too?”

“…”

“Because I still happen to have mine.” Fai trails off with a Cheshire grin. He catches Kurogane’s eye with a tentative spark of blue and opens the path to the Scaffold once more. One of the Shard’s glass panels swings open like a door, revealing a simple plank-staircase drops impossibly far and long in a single direction.

“Why are you like this?” Now that Kurogane has more connection to the Song, Fai’s space wears at him like metaphysical sandpaper, but it’s nothing he can’t handle. Not like the agony that had shot through him while the Song had been in his head. He keeps his fingers locked with Fai’s and starts to follow.

“Like what?”

“You could just ask me to come over.”

“How presumptuous, Kuro-rude! All I said was that I have my keys!” Fai steps from the stair to a fire escape to a pulley that forces them to balance precariously on one foot, pressed back to front as it slowly lowers. “By the way,” he whispers in the shell of Kurogane’s ear. “Did you want to come over?”

Kurogane nearly stumbles off the pulley into the abyss, cursing all the way. “Should I take that as a no?” Fai laughs, his hand keeping Kurogane firmly on solid-ish ground. “Could I entice you if I offer passable coffee?”

He doesn’t understand how a single person can be so infuriating and perfect at the same time. Maybe he’s the victim of some other spell—maybe Fai has cast a long net and finally reeled him in to the trap. Maybe Kurogane wouldn’t care if he did. He just hopes Fai never lets go again.

“Yeah,” he says, chasing after the idiot he loves through impossible paths, dizzy for reasons other than vertigo. “I could go for a coffee.”

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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